Avalon chips question

[hyperdallas]

Can a k16 klondike board with avalon chips mine for litecoin and bitcoin?

[J35st3r]

Can a k16 klondike board with avalon chips mine for litecoin and bitcoin?

Not litecoin as it uses the scrypt algorithm. Completely different. No ASIC (or FPGA) currently does scrypt.

It mines bitcoin or (probably) any other SHA256 ALT coin (but why would you bother with the ALTs?)

[icey]

Any Sha256 coin

[Alexander The Great]

Yep LTC and other script currencies dont work with ASICS.

[Alexander The Great]

I think its good ASICS dont work with LTC because miners with ASICS would rape the rest..

[J35st3r]

Sure it can!

Umm, care to provide a reference for that? Scrypt is a very different beast from sha256.

[Eva Braun]

yes it can

[Eva Braun]

Im just kidding I dont actually know if it will work or not..

[davidrools]

ASICs made to mine Bitcoins can't mine Litecoins, but ASICs for Litecoins may be developed if it appears profitable for someone to do so.

An ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) is any chip made to do a specific task. There's one in your mouse that processes and compares the images of your desk to track your movement. One thing the scrypt-based alt-coin tries to do is require more memory for computation, which is more expensive to scale up compared to the bitcoin algorithm, which doesn't require much memory and can scale with ASICs more cost effectively. So, Litecoin ASICs have a higher bar to reach than Bitcoin when it comes to whether or not it makes sense to make an ASIC for mining.