Modifying usb block eruptors to mine scrypt coins

[sameev29]

Is it possible to somehow modify the usb block eruptor miners coding or a part of hardware to mine scrypt based coins instead of SHA-256 coins?

[dentldir]

Nope.

I suppose you could tape out your own scrypt ASIC in the BE100 form factor, somehow add on a memory bus, add a stack of memory chips, rework the power section, add new oscillators, and then rewrite all the drivers.

But in reality, nope.
 

[jasinlee]

Nope.

I suppose you could tape out your own scrypt ASIC in the BE100 form factor, somehow add on a memory bus, add a stack of memory chips, rework the power section, add new oscillators, and then rewrite all the drivers.

But in reality, nope.
 

That would be one huge USB miner.

[GaliX]

Nope.

I suppose you could tape out your own scrypt ASIC in the BE100 form factor, somehow add on a memory bus, add a stack of memory chips, rework the power section, add new oscillators, and then rewrite all the drivers.

But in reality, nope.
 

That would be one huge USB miner.

Are there still no "real" informations about Asic scrypt miner for the future?

[jasinlee]

There are plenty of documents explaining how fpga and asic conversion would be possible via VHDL. Memorial university in canada has several enlightening PDFs online explaining how it could be done and the limitations.

[jasinlee]

No, ASICs have 1 purpose when they were designed to mine BTC. BTC uses sha256, nothing else, so anything you told it to process using scrypt it would just get rejected hashes since they wont process the information at all. LTC uses both sha256 and scrypt so the chip would have to be designed to do both....which is a massive feat since chips are not generally designed with enough bandwidth to work with scrypt.

[jasinlee]

For proof of work, Bitcoin uses the highly parallelizable SHA256 hash function, hence Bitcoin mining is an embarrassingly parallel task. Litecoin uses scrypt instead of SHA256 for proof of work. The scrypt hash function uses SHA256 as a subroutine, but also depends on fast access to large amounts of memory rather than depending just on fast arithmetic operations, so it is more difficult to run many instances of scrypt in parallel by using the ALUs of a modern graphics card. This also implies that the manufacturing cost of specialized scrypt hardware (ASIC) will be significantly more expensive than SHA256 ASIC. Since modern GPUs have plenty of RAM, they do prove useful for Litecoin mining, though the improvement over CPUs is less significant than it was for Bitcoin mining (about 10x speedup instead of 20x speedup when comparing Radeon 5870 GPU to quad-core CPU).

The particular scrypt parameters that Litecoin uses (N=1024,p=1,r=1) let non-mining users who run the full client (and thereby verify and propagate the blocks) multitask in their operating system without affecting the responsiveness. These scrypt parameter still reduce the advantage of ASIC by a 10-fold estimate, according to Colin Percival, the creator of scrypt[1][2].

https://litecoin.info/Comparison_between_Litecoin_and_Bitcoin

In short yes.

[crazy_rabbit]

Is it possible to somehow modify the usb block eruptor miners coding or a part of hardware to mine scrypt based coins instead of SHA-256 coins?

Nope, not possible.

[iGotSpots]

No. ASIC means Application Specific Integrated Circuit. The damn things couldn't even add 1 + 1, yet you think they will be able to solve a complicated, unrelated mathematical algorithm?

[cp1]

Cant the usb block eruptors be rewired to do the same?

Sure, but you'd need very small hands.

[jasinlee]

Cant the usb block eruptors be rewired to do the same?

Sure, but you'd need very small hands.

lol, carnies

[prins]

the whole point of scrypt was to not have all the asic miners be able to outmine the non asic users.
Apparantly new scrypt asic miners are being developed (still litlle is known about them though), but theres like no chance for your sha256 to be able to be used on scrypt coins.

[chalkyuk]

Anyone else have any thoughts?

I think winter is coming....

[hdclover]

out of RAM

[jasinlee]

So can someone manufacture usb block eruptors to mine scrypt coins at 333khash/sec just like the ones we see now?

@sameev29

I dunno, I bet Realsolid could code it in C++.

~BCX~

After he finishes his current scam, he does take breaks between his scams.