SHA 256 style coins

[alnoor1231]

So can anyone explain to me(in detail) why it is that scrypt style coins are sooo much more successful than SHA-256 style coins. Thing is, a got a shiny new asic miner set up and the dang thing only mines coins that follow SHA-256 algorithm. Can`t we all get together and hash out this problem by creating an even remotely successful SHA-256 based coin??? I mean , Bitcoin is the most successful coin out there, couldn`t someone with some programming skills create a decent clone of it? If anyone has any ideas, please feel free to share here on this thread. Hell, I`ll even be willing to help sponsor if it`s a worthwhile idea.

[BobMarley]

of the last 30 or so coins only one has been released that is sha 256, the reason being is that asics can tear early starting sha-256 coins to shreds, this isnt currently possible with scrypt scypt-jan or primecoin mining because thier algorithsms are meant to be asic resistant

The reason coins can be broken by qasics is with the amount of new coins per day the hashing load gets sprad out too thin, one or two concentrated asics is enough to 51% attack new coins

[alnoor1231]

Oh, I see... So, there`s no possible way to create asic resistant SHA-256 style coins? And isn`t it possible that someone can create a chip to increase hash rate for scrypt coins the same way asic chips increased hashing rates for Bitcoin?

[FiiNALiZE]

Oh, I see... So, there`s no possible way to create asic resistant SHA-256 style coins? And isn`t it possible that someone can create a chip to increase hash rate for scrypt coins the same way asic chips increased hashing rates for Bitcoin?

Yes an ASIC for Scrypt is theoretically possible, but it'll cost millions of dollars to research and develop a working ASIC.

If the price of LTC (or any other Scrypt coin) shoots up then an ASIC will definitely be created.

[alnoor1231]

Ah, wonderful. LTC has my support then. I`ll go buy some right now. This is because I assume, if and when an asic for scrypt is created, people will flock back to SHA-256 style coins! Am I right?

[SirMintALot]

No, they probaby will switch to scrypt-jane (needs lot of memory compared to simple scrypt) or SHA3

[alnoor1231]

Oh...and I guess today`s asic miners will not be compatible with either.....

[SirMintALot]

Yepp. ASIC means Aplication Specific Integrated Circuit. They can just do one thing, and the current ASICs like Jalapenos, Block Erupters, etc. can only do SHA256d hashing (which means creating a SHA256 hash and then creating a SHA256 hash of that hash), nothing else.
If there will be simple scrypt ASICs one day, then you could only use them for Scrypt (N=1024, r=1, p=1) with salsa 20/8 mixing and final SHA256 hashing as Litecoin, Feathercoin, Novacoin and 99% of all other altcoins use it. But you cant use them for scrypt jane coins like Yacoin (N=variable starting with 64 and doubing with every step, r=1, p=1, chacha 20/8 mixing and finaly Keccak512 hashing) and clones (YBCoin, ZCCoin, J-Coin, Freecoin,...), Onecoin (scrypt 1024,1,1 with salsa64 and blake512), Solidcoin 2.0 (Blake512 with SHA 256), Sifcoin and Quarkcoin (mixing randomly 3 different SHA candidates (Blake512, Keccak512, Skein, Gröstl, JH, Treefish512)), Copper Lark (Keccak512), Memorycoin (mixing high N scrypt with SHA512) or Primecoin (calculation primes).
Starting now a SHA256d coin with lots of ASICs available, is dangerous, as you only have only two choices:
1.) release it as a combined POW/POS coin and do a big premine, hold that premine until the POS of the other users kicks in to protect the coin and then give the premine away for bountys and faucets. But there will be lots of dumb people that will blame you because of the premine and that wont mine your coin
2.) release it unprotectect (without POS and premine), but then there is a high risk of a 51% attack which anyone with a big ASIC Farm could do
Thats why you dont see much new SHA256d coins, Zetacoin is lucky IMHO that it is still alive.

[worldinacoin]

They are certainly not more successful than SHA 256.   The reason you see so little launch of SHA 256 is that it is totally dominated by Bitcoin, developers of Alt Coins know they do not have much chance against Bitcoin.

[pr9me]

They are certainly not more successful than SHA 256.   The reason you see so little launch of SHA 256 is that it is totally dominated by Bitcoin, developers of Alt Coins know they do not have much chance against Bitcoin.

The fact that BTC uses SHA is not reason for why there are only a few other alts that use it. That reason is because it is very easy to 51% a new SHA with the number of ASIC's that are out in the wild now. As we know when BTC was coming up, there weren't as many ASIC's around and it was able to survive, but it had it's bumps along the way, for sure!

My question is, what can be done to successfully launch a new SHA-based coin at this point in the ASIC game? Anyone?

[SirMintALot]

They are certainly not more successful than SHA 256.   The reason you see so little launch of SHA 256 is that it is totally dominated by Bitcoin, developers of Alt Coins know they do not have much chance against Bitcoin.

The fact that BTC uses SHA is not reason for why there are only a few other alts that use it. That reason is because it is very easy to 51% a new SHA with the number of ASIC's that are out in the wild now. As we know when BTC was coming up, there weren't as many ASIC's around and it was able to survive, but it had it's bumps along the way, for sure!

My question is, what can be done to successfully launch a new SHA-based coin at this point in the ASIC game? Anyone?

I have to quote myself:

1.) release it as a combined POW/POS coin and do a big premine, hold that premine until the POS of the other users kicks in to protect the coin and then give the premine away for bountys and faucets. But there will be lots of dumb people that will blame you because of the premine and that wont mine your coin

I cant think of an other way to start a new coin. You have to protect the coin with your premine stake until the stake of the other miners protects the coin.

[markm]

They are certainly not more successful than SHA 256.   The reason you see so little launch of SHA 256 is that it is totally dominated by Bitcoin, developers of Alt Coins know they do not have much chance against Bitcoin.

The fact that BTC uses SHA is not reason for why there are only a few other alts that use it. That reason is because it is very easy to 51% a new SHA with the number of ASIC's that are out in the wild now. As we know when BTC was coming up, there weren't as many ASIC's around and it was able to survive, but it had it's bumps along the way, for sure!

My question is, what can be done to successfully launch a new SHA-based coin at this point in the ASIC game? Anyone?

There has been very little need to launch more of them because there have always been some that are so low difficulty that anyone can easily mine them, so all the work of making and launching a new one was not needed, if you wanted a "new" one all you had to do was add one to your merge that hardly anyone else was bothering with at the time.

The way the first wave of SHA256 clonecoins such as namecoin, devcoin, groupcoin, ixcoin, i0coin, coiledcoin and geistgeld protected themselves from ASIC-attack was merged mining. Why bother to attack a merged mined coin instead of just adding it to your merge? Nonetheless a few attacks were attempted, for example Luke tried to crush coiledcoin in its early days.

Among the recent new batch of clones there have been some SHA256 coins too, but they started out without merged mining, some were total clones of bitcoins maybe with no changes at all really other than name and port and handshake stuff that just makes the coins not get confused as to which coin they actually are.

Bytecoin was a bitcoin clone for example, and maybe the first one of the new batch to seriously consider that maybe all the older SHA256 coins might have had a good idea in going to merged minining. Last I heard bytecoin seemed like it was trying to implement merged mining so that people could mine it alongside bitcoins, namecoins, devcoins, groupcoins, ixcoins, i0coins, coiledcoins and geistgeld.

Currently coiledcoin and geistgeld are still so low difficulty that they might as well be newly launched coins, they are easy for newbies to mine with small rigs heck even with just a single GPU or block-eruptor, and unlike a newly launched coin they aren't being orphaned to death by instamining large mining farms. (Coiledcoin that already happened when it launched years ago, but the attacker who did that might not even have bothered saving the wallets so maybe all the attacker's coins got destroyed even.)

Basically launching a new coin you tend to get jumped, so new coins are not really much good for small miners. Old coins that large miners are ignoring is where the big payoffs are for small miners.

Merged mining seems to help a lot because it seems maybe only raving fanatics attack merged coins instead of simply merging them to add yet more income to their existing array of merged coins, since merged coins are darn close to being freebies you can just pick up on the side while still mining all the coins you already mine.

Old coins that get ignored for months or years are especially good because they are the fairest launches of all, since by the time they get popular everyone and anyone had a fair chance to mine them nice and easy for months or years.

You can sit there with even CPUs in some cases, or just one low end GPU or whatever, mining them day in and day out at pretty much zero cost so that in some months or years when finally the mainstream catches on you will have quite nice stashes of them.

-MarkM-

[Balthazar]

2.) release it unprotectect (without POS and premine), but then there is a high risk of a 51% attack which anyone with a big ASIC Farm could do

3) It's quite simple, add a little change into block header format and existing ASICs will be unable to mine it. GPU and FPGA miners will work as usual, after small patches.

[thefunkybits]

Zetacoin is lucky IMHO that it is still alive.

I think ZET is still alive due to the difficulty changing so fast, if ASICMINER pointed their rigs to Zetacoin that might be a different story however

[markm]

Yeah but it does not have merged mining, so it cannot really be secured, there will probably always be more hashing power out there that has no stake in it thus can trash it for fun any time than there is dedicated to it. Maybe though the new strategy is to first rake in all the coins yourself before adding merged mining, then add merged mining later to get it secured once you have mined all the coins, or something.

If you look at the tables and plots linked to from http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html you will see some very nicely prospering coins, that are waiting to see what happens to Ixcoin once there is no more minting. Those coins used to be SHA256 coins but could not get enough hashing power to be secure, even with merged mining, because people have been so slow to adopt full-panoply merged mining of all possible coins. Those coins are still waiting for readily available ASICs they have been waiting maybe a year and a half for so they can all turn themselves back into merged mined SHA256 coins and do massively merged mining, mining all of them alongside all the current crop of merged mined coins.

All these recent clones that are dying all around us currently are all way too vulnerable to be as valuable as those on the tables and plots at the above link, since the more valuable a coin is the more tempting target it is likely to be to double-spenders and the like. They got to be worth so much by temporarily retreating to Open Transactions pending the arrival of an era of merged ASIC mining of large numbers of coins, including coins that already minted all their coins long ago so only have transaction fees to offer to miners to convince miners to mine them. (Hence the interest in seeing how Ixcoin fares soon when it reaches that stage of its lifecycle...)

-MarkM-

[barwizi]

Would it be possible to say merge mine all these new coins, (up to 5) without including Bitcoin?

[markm]

Would it be possible to say merge mine all these new coins, (up to 5) without including Bitcoin?

Why only up to five? I currently merge eight including bitcoin, but sure I could use any of the bitcoin clones instead of bitcoin or maybe could just leave out bitcoin and use namecoin or devcoin or any of the others as the primary coin in the merge, I think, though I have not tried it. Certainly terracoin or bytecoin ought to work instead of bitcoin.

But since bitcoin pays all the electricity for all the others, why the heck leave bitcoin out? It is over 90% of the value of the entire merge...

I do not know whether ppcoin can act as primary in a merge.

-MarkM-

[barwizi]

Would it be possible to say merge mine all these new coins, (up to 5) without including Bitcoin?

Why only up to five? I currently merge eight including bitcoin, but sure I could use any of the bitcoin clones instead of bitcoin or maybe could just leave out bitcoin and use namecoin or devcoin or any of the others as the primary coin in the merge, I think, though I have not tried it. Certainly terracoin or bytecoin ought to work instead of bitcoin.

But since bitcoin pays all the electricity for all the others, why the heck leave bitcoin out? It is over 90% of the value of the entire merge...

I do not know whether ppcoin can act as primary in a merge.

-MarkM-

Perhaps you could encourage people to merge mine if you wrote a simple How To guide when you have time. As in, how to take normal sha256 clones and add to Bitcoin.

[markm]

Perhaps you could encourage people to merge mine if you wrote a simple How To guide when you have time. As in, how to take normal sha256 clones and add to Bitcoin.

We offered bounties for free open source software for divvying up the merged coins so people could set up merged mining pools, since for most people even just compiling and running all the daemons, or heck even just running all the daemons even if someone else compiled them, is apparently quite challenging. No one took us up on it though.

There is a thread since long long ago detailing how to easily use p2pool to merged mine, tried searching this forum? I think maybe CaptChadd started that thread not positive on that though.

Meanwhile of course people can use bitparking's merged mining pool if they don't mind not getting some of the possible to merge coins. He recently added i0coin back in and added groupcoin in so all you'd miss by using mmpool is the coiledcoins and geistgeld. The guy working on trying to make bytecoin able to be merged mined seemed to hiunt too that maybe once that is ready maybe doublec might be planning to add it into bitparking's merge too.

So simplest instructions, albeit not covering quite all the current crop of merged mined coins, is "go mine at bitparking's mmpool".

-MarkM-

[barwizi]

Perhaps you could encourage people to merge mine if you wrote a simple How To guide when you have time. As in, how to take normal sha256 clones and add to Bitcoin.

We offered bounties for free open source software for divvying up the merged coins so people could set up merged mining pools, since for most people even just compiling and running all the daemons, or heck even just running all the daemons even if someone else compiled them, is apparently quite challenging. No one took us up on it though.

There is a thread since long long ago detailing how to easily use p2pool to merged mine, tried searching this forum? I think maybe CaptChadd started that thread not positive on that though.

Meanwhile of course people can use bitparking's merged mining pool if they don't mind not getting some of the possible to merge coins. He recently added i0coin back in and added groupcoin in so all you'd miss by using mmpool is the coiledcoins and geistgeld. The guy working on trying to make bytecoin able to be merged mined seemed to hiunt too that maybe once that is ready maybe doublec might be planning to add it into bitparking's merge too.

So simplest instructions, albeit not covering quite all the current crop of merged mined coins, is "go mine at bitparking's mmpool".

-MarkM-

I'd actually like to add some of the new coins, so a guide o do it myself would be simpler. I am comfortable with compiling by myself so i think i'll try search the forum. If i understand it well enough i may consider mining BTC again.