What's best - SHA256 or Scrypt?

[Vlad2Vlad]

I have to presume Satoshi thought or this stuff cause ASICS have been around a long time.  Another reason I like SHA256 over scrypt - besides merge mining many coins together it feels good staying on the path build by the genius who put together bitcoin.  

yeah it feels good hoping Bitcoin makes its way to the largest collection of financial institutions in the world

You can tell the people who are all about Bitcoin with money in mind, and those who actually use their minds

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic.

Bitcoin getting an ETF will definitely change everything but it will be a boon for all alt coins.

In the long run, like anything good - politicians and bankers will take over and destroy all that is good, and bitcoin is no different.

I laugh when I hear bitcoin millionaires talk about how bitcoin is private and the banks and the govt can't track you and watch you, etc.

That's laughable - they're all just waiting to really catch on with the masses before they come in and hijack the most popular one and kill or cripple the rest, in the name of national security.

Digital money would give the government and banks absolutely and total control over the masses with zero privacy left.  That is a guarantee and that's actually what drew me to alt coins cause I know they won't be allowed to fail.

Those pros in the media and wallstreet who laugh at bitcoin getting an ETF license and say it's not possible are truly clueless.

[hate_the_face]

stereotypical remaining Bitcoin supporters at this point in time

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KrNpxODiDA

I think you guys know how Denzell winds up in the end

[Vlad2Vlad]

stereotypical remaining Bitcoin supporters at this point in time

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KrNpxODiDA

I think you guys know how Denzell winds up in the end

Aahahhahaaaaa.  Great movie.


That's so funny.  That's the exact clip I imagined the second you said Denzel.

[Vivisector999]

Here's some advice for you Vlad.  Since your semi broke, and don't seem to have the basics down yet.

You aren't the developer.  Satoshi is/was the developer.  If you make an alt coin you are doing so because Satoshi gave the code out for free to anyone that wanted to make a few changes to it (Hense why it isn't costing you $500,000 to launch an alt coin).  Everything here is open source.   You are surrounded here by programmers and people who want to change the world.  Most aren't doing it for the money.  Keeping your ideas to yourself, and paying a programmer upwards of $10,000 for each groundbreaking change isn't going to net you anything, since all the code you paid $10,000 for is free for everyone that wants to use it right after you put it out there.  If you do have groundbreaking ideas, it is probably best for a person with no programming skills and not a lot of money to release them to the public now.  Someone may write the code for you for free, or when you finally get ahold of someone to make a coin for you, you can get them to copy that part of the code for your coin as well.

You keep claiming you want to make a coin for the miners.  But 99% of the alt coins being released are made for the miners, as 100% of the coins minted  are released to the miners.  In your coin you are always trying to have the miners pay you a "tax" for being the one to "develop" the Miners coin.

Before you think ASIC's are the way of the future, and that when Bitcoin becomes popular everyone and their dog will have a Miner.  That couldn't be further from the truth.  Only the tech nerd types will be wanting to continue mining.  As more people get into mining with ASIC's the less and less money they make with them.  Only a certain amount of coins gets released, and that number halves every so often.  I really hope the future doesn't involve 2 billion people fighting with 5 Thash/s machines for 5 Bitcoins.  Lol, it's not hard to see even at 300W, everyone will be losing money with that one.  The way you make money is to buy into the product, not the mining aspect of it.  Not sure if you realize it, but even a 50 G Hash/s ASIC miner, if the difficulty went to only 2 billion would only make $0.03 a day after power at $0.14/KWh.  And 2 billion difficulty will happen if probably less than 50,000 people all bought a 50 GHash miner.  Even if everyone was mining on 50 T hash/s machines, the amount of coins distributed to all the people mining would still be the exact same payout as if everyone went back to CPU's and mined at 5 khash/s

And yes ASIC's can mine any sha256 based currency.  What they can't do is mine Scrypt.  And the programming behind scrypt was designed to make it quite expensive of an endeavor to create a scrypt ASIC miner.  Not to say that day won't happen.  But if Bitcoin needed to go above say $50 before it became profitable to start creating it, Litecoin would probably have to be sitting near $250 before someone figured it was time to pour a few million into developing a Scrypt based ASIC miner.  

But again.  It's your coin.  Don't rely on polls to tell you what coin you should have copied, since I can see you have your heart set on SHA256 no matter what the polls say.  You have to many other things going against you that really I don't think this aspect will be what sinks you.

[Vlad2Vlad]

Thanks for your input.

First let me clear about SHA256, in no way did I even think anyone would compare my coin to bitcoin, that's silly.  Maybe ixCoin since that was a total clone, but not my coin as my coin would be quite different, I hope.

The biggest reason for SHA256 for me is to give the ability to merge mine it.  I watched ixCoin being abandoned and yet it didn't die and that impressed me cause it should have died so I have been buying ixCoins ever since cause I think there's something there and I think people and bankers alike will soon compare it to Bitcoin. I mean, even the developer's name is a derivative of Satoshi.  

The reason ixCoin survived was cause of merge mining.  Merge mining is gonna get bigger and bigger and it's a sure thing to help any coin looking to get popular and build a strong network.  Without SHA256 there is no merge mining.  

My second reason for SHA256 is making it future proof and this is where we disagree.  I see a huge wave of awareness coming as soon as Bitcoin gets its own ETF.  I watched it happen with the Internet funds in the early 90's.  At first everyone was laughing and when those funds made mad money there was a rush to copy and make more big Internet funds.

Wallstreet will look to copy bitcoin so I think they'll choose ixCoin.  

At any rate, there will be a huge boom coming (next year) in awareness and with cheap ASIC miners the masses will get in on it.  I see it as foolish to design a coin which will not meet the needs of millions of ASIC miners in the very near future 12-24 months.  

These are my legit reasons - absolutely nothing to do with confusing newbies.

As for just giving out my ideas, I know this is open source which is why I don't care if anyone uses anything i can think of but since I think it's a good and original idea I wanna wait in case I launch my own coin.  I'll know in a matter of days and if not then I'll give the idea away in case it is a good one.

But hey, I thought routing 25% of the coins back to the miners was a great idea and it wasn't so who know, this feature I'm thinking of may be seen as a joke.  But I'm glad we had some position and informative conversations on these new threads and polls.  And the polls did help me a lot - I gave up on the idea of launching CatholicCoin and OrphanCoin due to the polls.  Helpful indeed.  But I haven't heard any solid arguments for scrypt - just mostly fear of ASICS and that's not a good reason cause ASICS are the future and the future is less than 1 year away.

Just watch bitcoin get the ETF license and then we'll talk cause nobody thinks they'll get it. Not the pros and experts anyway.  That's gonna change everything overnight like it did for the dot com era.  Buy and store as many alt coins as you can cause it's coming.  Good luck.

[Vivisector999]

The reason and the only reason not to choose SHA256 is because of ASIC's yes.  But not the fear of them coming.

The reason is.  Right now ASIC's are worth a pretty penny, and Bitcoin is struggling.  Everyone is going to be focusing on getting their money's worth with their miner which means they won't be mining a coin worth a penny or 2.  So when you launch you will only be attracting GPU miners that are interested in the next new coin.  And it will be that case for quite some time until after you can generate some value into your coin.  During that time, you may be looking at having 10-20 Ghash/s of hashing away on your network.  It's not hard to see that anyone that has just received their 50 GHash/s BFL ASIC miner can easily 51% attack your coin.  Just to say they did it.  This is where the security risk is when launching a new coin based on SHA256.  If on the other hand you had your 10-20 MHash/s scrypt coin going.  It will take someone with a decent sized GPU farm to pull it off.  It would essentially be a guy with that $20,000 rig you liked the photo of his equipment.  There are a lot less guys like that then there are guys receiving their BFL shipment (Well that can still be debated  LOL ) And that is where the security in Scrypt lies for newly launched coins.  It takes fairly dedicated equipment to pull it off, and not a rogue guy having fun.

If your coin survives it's infancy, and someone actually decides to write to code to merge mine your coin along side Bitcoin (which would be a longshot), or you get a few ASIC's mining for you, then suddenly your security problems are no worse then they were if you were on a scrypt coin.  Here is a promise though.  The Scrypt coins will always be around, and GPU miners will always exist.  Heck a few of the new coins are going back to the basics and only allowing CPU processing.  The purpose of Hashing in the first place is to spread the power over as many people as possible.  Video cards will always have a purpose outside mining, and Scrypt based coins like Litecoin won't be flipping over to SHA256.

[Zas]

I'd probably like to point out that if you're trying to do this for profit, it's going to be a pump and dump scheme. That's all there is to it. Treating it like a playground, a game if you will (because that's what it is to be honest), will deter the larger players and encourage the very smaller players. Much like a penny arcade where people are just enjoying themselves compared to that big ass casino down the road where everyone is trying to game the system. Once profit comes into it, you lose your objectiveness as money is a bit different.

Now. Scrypt is apparently somewhat more difficult to break by big miners, this is a protection to smaller miners who aren't going to be fussed about any kind of multi-mining to begin with at least for the first year or so. It's quite possible that you could start up another alt-coin, a sister coin that you could do merge mining with but that's apparently the only advantage of Sha-256d. Basically, by going with Sha-256d you are saying that you don't have any faith in your own currency and by going with Scrypt you are supporting smaller miners.

[Vlad2Vlad]

Ok, now we're making progress.  I finally got a clear answer.

I didn't know what you meant by scrypt has better security.  You were talking about the ease of 51% attacks on SHA256.  On that regard I don't care, I truly want to let the market decide:  make or break this coin.  I think that will be a true test.

And of course a person can have a great coin and some idiot kills it cause he's got 5 Tera Hash ASIC rigs and like you said, not cause the coin sucks but just because he can.  That's my only worry but I still want to see if this coin can pass such a test as it would say a lot to me.

Then the code writing - it would help so much if I knew more cause I hear different things all the time. I thought to make a coin so it can be merge mined was fairly simple if you think of it from the get-go, which I am.  Cause without the possibility of merge mining it doesn't make much sense to do SHA256.  That was the biggest reason.

So I need to ask some programmers - how difficult is it to make a new SHA256 coin so that it can be merge mined with the likes of Bitcoin.  I mean, I imagine 95% of the code is copy and paste, I don't see what would require so much work for a merge mine feature but then again, I was saying SHAW instead of SHA until some guy corrected me today so that's how much I know.

If a programmer can chime in I would appreciate it cause the best profits are in mining multiple coins at once.  TIA!

[Vlad2Vlad]

@zas,

I have faith in this coin otherwise why would I launch it with a 3 day warning and on SHA256 where it can get killed?

Why would I want to avoid SHA256 if you yourself are saying the price of the coin will go considerably higher than scrypt?   You're saying I'll lose my objectivity and become corrupt and dump everything and ruin the coin, right?  What am I gonna dump, there's no premine and the 1% I'd get would be peanuts compared to the whole market.

And I have a bit more control than that. If I was doing this for profits first I Would have gone with my CatholicCoin idea cause I personally believed that coin would have brought in a large stable Christian user base. 

So far I have altered this coin launch per the wishes of the miners and the alt community cause I want to avoid another crap coin but I have to tell you, this SHA256 vs Scrypt part is hard for me to let go cause it makes so much more sense to do SHA256.  And I disagree, it shows I have a lot of confidence in the coin as it means I think it will survive a very likely 51% attack.


I get the feeling most people voting for scrypt are doing so simply out of personal interest - it's easier to mine a scrypt coin if you're a small miner but that's because most people don't realize how cheap and available ASICS will be in the coming year so they're just misinformed and acting out of fear.  I'm a small guy and I'm buying what ASICS I can cause I see huge money in merged mining.

Not the $1.20 per day I was clearing with a new dual 7850 GPU rig.  For that money you can get nearly a 40GH BFL ASIC and make 10-20 times more money even with a way higher difficulty by focusing on merged mining.  It looks like the majority of miners aren't seeing this possibility or maybe they don't want to risk buying ASICS.

I've been very outspoken on here, there's gonna me a lot of guys gunning for any coin I launch. 

So I say it all rides on what a programmer says about how hard or easy it would be to make a new SHA256 coin so it can merge mine. If it's easy then it's a done deal but if not then i'll probably go with Scrypt cause if rather spend my money on real features.

[Vlad2Vlad]

And I'm not seeing this as a playground but a Serious endeavor.  That's why I'm asking all these questions and running all these polls.  I really want to release a serious and respectable coin so I don't care about the short term profits - long term is where things get interesting and more rewarding for everyone.

[Vlad2Vlad]

Hey how about this?

What rule says I need to be stuck on one or the other?  Why can't I launch a SHA256 coin and the same exact coin on Scrypt.  I mean its a total cut and paste job for the most part so I can probably get a break on the programming for the second coin.

I mean, if you saw a dual Litecoin launch wouldn't you say, oh cool, I can mine that later when I get an ASIC but for now I'll mine the Scrypt version.  Why not?  It's just more money for the launch but if they survive each will be supported by their respective mining community - SHA256 vs Scrypt.

And what a wonderful experiment - this would answer a lot of unknowns and a lot of questions for future coin launches and you get to see how each one performs by comparison since everything is equal except the cryptography.

That's the best way and I think a lot of debs would be curious to see what happens and which version stays on top or succeeds more and many may tweak their future launches based on this experiment.

Now I need to find out how much extra a programmer would charge for a dual launch.  This way everyone is happy, a true miner's coin.

Nuggets 1.0 and Nuggets 2.0....lol

[Zas]

Vlad, the miners want scrypt apparently. (I voted undecided and unfortunately I can't change my vote) and Wolf has a point two different block chains mean two different coins. The market would choose the Scrypt coin and dump the Sha because they see it (I see it) as a coin that's likely be around for a while. The best long term coins offer low yet consistent reward.

[Vlad2Vlad]

Justin Bieber got more votes than SHA256. That was the reason for that question.

Yeah, it's pretty clear, most people aren't ready for ASIC mining or merge mining.  And since this coin is designed for miners then scrypt it is.  And that's final.  If this works out I can always launch an even better coin for SHA256. 

Thanks for all your inputs.  It was hard letting go of the merged mining idea.  I just assumed most people were already doing it or in the process of buying ASICS. Maybe in a year or two.

[Zas]

Perhaps most people are. I'm not, I simply just want to be able to take part, nothing more nothing less. It's of my opinion that mining should be for everyone not just the few with high spec computers.

[Vlad2Vlad]

Perhaps most people are. I'm not, I simply just want to be able to take part, nothing more nothing less. It's of my opinion that mining should be for everyone not just the few with high spec computers.

I agree, i'm part of the small miner group.  That's why I wanna do a miner's coin.

I got so frustrated with my first mining rig which cost $1,700 which barely mined enough to pay the electricity (LTC POOL mining) that I took it back to Fry's and lost $300 on the deal.

I wanna help change that experience.  I want mining to be a bit more fun And rewarding and not such a flatline experience and I really think this VGB Protocol will help and this 10% distribution will be the icing in the cake.

I can't wait!

[Vlad2Vlad]

I'm gonna get to bed.  Hopefully tomorrow these programmer guys will get back to me.

Goodnight.

[digitalindustry]

Man, I'm shocked by the responses to the poll, most want scrypt.  

I don't have an ASIC although I ordered some 2 months ago but I badly wanna merge-mine so for me that alone means SHA256.

I expected most to want SHA256 for the same reason.  

I'm very surprised here but hey, if that's what people want I'll do it.  This isn't the right time to be stubborn.

Can somebody tell me if a hard fork is easy to Implement say next year if people all of sudden wanna switch to SHA256?  Hypothetically speaking - would this be hard to do with a scrypt coin?  TIA.

your surprise could come from the basic error in the question that you asked - you made some assumptions in the topic that were basically flawed , you equated ASIC shipments and access with "Profit Ratio".

these two things are very different .

[digitalindustry]

I voted Justin Bieber, because its just true .

{although that whole MJ thing she's doing is getting a little creepy}

[hate_the_face]

I get the feeling most people voting for scrypt are doing so simply out of personal interest

as opposed to the people who pre-ordered ASICs over a year ago? What form of interest would that fall under?

- it's easier to mine a scrypt coin if you're a small miner but that's because most people don't realize how cheap and available ASICS will be in the coming year so they're just misinformed and acting out of fear.  I'm a small guy and I'm buying what ASICS I can cause I see huge money in merged mining.

More like acting out of foresight. Keep thinking we are misinformed when you and every other fuckhead who found out about bitcoin 3 months ago plugs in their ASICs and gets the same fucking results as they do now with GPUs. The only difference is, the manufacturers of these machines are obviously stalling as long as possible in the interest of pure profits. They do not care about you or anyone else desperate enough to pre-order their shit.

Not the $1.20 per day I was clearing with a new dual 7850 GPU rig.  For that money you can get nearly a 40GH BFL ASIC and make 10-20 times more money even with a way higher difficulty by focusing on merged mining.  It looks like the majority of miners aren't seeing this possibility or maybe they don't want to risk buying ASICS.

You spent 1,700 dollars on your mining rig and turn around and wonder why you don't make any profits? People like you are the reason ASICs even exist in the first place. You are totally looking at them the wrong way, and can't see anything beyond your own fucking greed. People who tout ASICs as the future are solely saying that because they feel like they can still gain a leg up on everyone else by buying them. The problem is when the product you are banking on being released is currently being used to do exactly what you plan to do with it before too many people get their hands on them, you have already lost. Bitcoin is not about furthering the coin's widespread support anymore, it is just operating under that guise with the real agenda being OBLIGATORY, OBVIOUS, and OBLIVIOUS greed.


You act like your future project coin will gain any sort of respect, when you constantly contradict yourself and provide no evidence of the ability to look at things objectively. You are not part of the "small miner group" when you fully support the very thing that is pushing that group out of Bitcoin. People tout Bitcoin as being decentralized and allowing anyone to be able to join network, when in reality, a handful of companies are releasing stalling the very devices that will wipe it's ass with that notion while keeping foolish people such as yourself running in line to attach themselves to the puppet strings.

[Zas]

That's a tad harsh. People  do whatever is likely to net them the best rewards. In this case, they see bitcoin as somewhere to 'make' money and to do that they need to invest in ASICs. It is not the fault of the miners who are doing everything they can to be the best they can be. It is the fault of the designer for not taking into account Moores law and defending against it. (It's obvious that there was some thought, to tech advances, just not enough).

Scrypt is what has arisen out of this need to help smaller players and the new digital currency will be born eventually. Bitcoin will not, cannot succeed, but it has done its job and carved out the niche the path forward for developers to search after. I don't even think that any digital currency based on Scrypt is going to make the cut either. If anything then it'll be a currency based on SHA-3 that's likely to hit the big time. You'll probably see Bitcoin and a variety of others flounder until the next economical problems arise and then there will be another flurry of activity, that much is obvious.

In the future I hope to see cryptocurrencies that are designed with an extremely wide reach and not just those with high spec computers designed specifically for Bitcoin mining, because that's the whole point and I think...the point behind Scrypt. But even still it's wrong to eject those who are doing the best they can with what they are able to get a hold of. It's just simple capitalism.