ASICs mining game

[marinko9]

I've read this article which was written by the SIA developer: https://blog.sia.tech/the-state-of-cryptocurrency-mining-538004a37f9b

In it it is explained the view how the ASICs are produced in secret, mining the coin in secret permanently or the big companies like Bitmain they mine with ASICs until they get their returns, then sell them to the public. People naively buy them in order to make some money but the real game is actually done by producers or big farms which don't even release their ASICs to the public.

What I didn't know too is that the ASICs can be produces to resist the hard forks and be hard fork flexible in a way, depending on the algorithm and the way they were produced.

It was explained how the Bitmain produced the ASIC for Siacoin and made the profit and developers couldn't do anything about it. It seems that everything regarding the mining is in the hands of hardware manufacturers.

I highly recommend to read the whole text, I learned a lot which I didn't know from it and I am now astonished how many secret games are playing in the background in the cryptocurrency mining game.

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[Metroid]

It was explained how the Bitmain produced the ASIC for Siacoin and made the profit and developers couldn't do anything about it. It seems that everything regarding the mining is in the hands of hardware manufacturers.

That is a lie, developers can do anything they like, if sia devs wanted to block asics, they could have done it. Bitmain probably gave them some money in exchange for their asics to work on their network, so in simple terms, bitmain bribed sia devs.

Also, sia devs got greedy and wanted to earn much more money, their enemy number one was gpu miners and they got shot by having let a loophole for bitmain while developing their asics but funny thing is that whoever was developing for sia devs was also developing prototypes for bitmain. Sia devs will never tell the truth though and it got backfired by their greedy, I remember i said to them, "You trolls made a mistake and your mistakes will backfire, be warned" and they launched even though I warned them.

As many lies lies within that blog article as many truths lies within there too.

[szafa]

Bitmain is not only one who produced ascic.

[manji]

I agree with @Metroid analyze

There are many of monopolies to "compete" in the market also war between the hardware and software dev, surely the affected an effect is the miners.

[DevelopmentBank]

I remember i said to them, "You trolls made a mistake and your mistakes will backfire, be warned" and they launched even though I warned them.

Yeah, multi-million dollar companies should really listen to people online on how to run their company. Specially when the online people call them trolls.

No offense though Metroid, your statement just really sounds too entitled and absurd not to comment on  

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That being said, the article is actually a very good read and was insightful for me as a miner. It makes me wanna sell my GPUs.

[realaccountakira]

Great article by David Vorvick. Nothing but admiration to him and the Sia team for doing an in-depth analysis.

Something that struck me from article is as follows:

I think there are a lot of people out there who do not realize that flexible ASICs are possible...

It may be sufficient sometimes, but just as algorithms can attempt to be ASIC resistant, ASICs can attempt to be hardfork resistant, especially when the changes are more minor.

As a miner, this frightens me because when this era of "flexible ASICs" arrive, GPU miners will definitely be obsolete. Add this to the threat of Ethereum going POS, it seems like the odds are stacked against us regular home-based miners. This might be a signal that now is a good time to liquidate mining rig assets and just directly invest in coins.

[arielbit]

Great article by David Vorvick. Nothing but admiration to him and the Sia team for doing an in-depth analysis.

Something that struck me from article is as follows:

I think there are a lot of people out there who do not realize that flexible ASICs are possible...

It may be sufficient sometimes, but just as algorithms can attempt to be ASIC resistant, ASICs can attempt to be hardfork resistant, especially when the changes are more minor.

As a miner, this frightens me because when this era of "flexible ASICs" arrive, GPU miners will definitely be obsolete. Add this to the threat of Ethereum going POS, it seems like the odds are stacked against us regular home-based miners. This might be a signal that now is a good time to liquidate mining rig assets and just directly invest in coins.

makes hybrid POW-POS, POS, masternode coins, and fast emission coins(before they got ASIC'd) look better since ASICs cannot dominate their economy..good luck.

[shaninium]

Great article by David Vorvick. Nothing but admiration to him and the Sia team for doing an in-depth analysis.

Something that struck me from article is as follows:

I think there are a lot of people out there who do not realize that flexible ASICs are possible...

It may be sufficient sometimes, but just as algorithms can attempt to be ASIC resistant, ASICs can attempt to be hardfork resistant, especially when the changes are more minor.

As a miner, this frightens me because when this era of "flexible ASICs" arrive, GPU miners will definitely be obsolete. Add this to the threat of Ethereum going POS, it seems like the odds are stacked against us regular home-based miners. This might be a signal that now is a good time to liquidate mining rig assets and just directly invest in coins.

Flexible asics wont have the performance of a normal asic and depending on that performance it might not be worth it.

[marinko9]

It was explained how the Bitmain produced the ASIC for Siacoin and made the profit and developers couldn't do anything about it. It seems that everything regarding the mining is in the hands of hardware manufacturers.

That is a lie, developers can do anything they like, if sia devs wanted to block asics, they could have done it. Bitmain probably gave them some money in exchange for their asics to work on their network, so in simple terms, bitmain bribed sia devs.

Also, sia devs got greedy and wanted to earn much more money, their enemy number one was gpu miners and they got shot by having let a loophole for bitmain while developing their asics but funny thing is that whoever was developing for sia devs was also developing prototypes for bitmain. Sia devs will never tell the truth though and it got backfired by their greedy, I remember i said to them, "You trolls made a mistake and your mistakes will backfire, be warned" and they launched even though I warned them.

As many lies lies within that blog article as many truths lies within there too.

It makes no sense that if they were bribed by Bitmain that they would develop their own Obelisk miners. Does it? They are also writing about dirty games Bitmain is playing so the article sounds quite sincere to me.

[2112]

As a miner, this frightens me because when this era of "flexible ASICs" arrive, GPU miners will definitely be obsolete. Add this to the threat of Ethereum going POS, it seems like the odds are stacked against us regular home-based miners. This might be a signal that now is a good time to liquidate mining rig assets and just directly invest in coins.

The thing is that it is relatively easy to write hash function that are very ASIC-proof or FPGA-proof.

Bytom folks are a good example. Their goal was not to be general-ASIC-proof but to make sure that the ASIC that is fast at implementing their hash it their ASIC. So they wrote a hash function that uses lots of floating point calculations exactly in the way that their AI-oriented ASIC does. The hard part of understanding Bytom's "Tensority" algorithm is finding exact information about the actual ASIC chips that are efficient doing those calculations.

But the general idea is very simple: if you don't want your XYZ devices to become, play to their strengths in designing the hash function.

For XYZ==GPU start with GPUs strengths. I haven't studied the recent GPU universal shader architecture, but the main idea was to optimize particular floating point computation used in 3D graphics using homogeneous coordinates, like AX=Y, where A is 4*4 matrix and X is 4*1 vector <x,y,z,w> where w==1. So include lots of those in your hash function. In particular GPUs are especially fast when using FP16, a half-precision floating point.

For XYZ==CPU made by Intel/AMD using x86 architecture, again start with their strengths. They have unique FPU unit with unique 10-byte floating point format and unique 8-byte BCD decimal integer format. Additionally they have dedicated hardware to compute various transcendental functions. So use a lot of those doing chaotic irreducible calculations like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_system . Of course one could write an emulation of those formats using quad-precision floating point (pairs of double-precision floats), but it will take many months.

During those months you have additional time to research more strengths of your GPUs or CPUs. Use them in a hard-fork to assure that the preferred vendor of your mining hardware continues to be Intel/AMD/Nvidia.

[bubaba]

i like this one

Our investigation into the mining equipment strongly suggests to us that the total manufacturing cost of the equipment is less than $1,000, meaning that anyone who paid $10,000 for it was paying a massive profit premium to the manufacturer, giving them the ability to make 9 more units for themselves.

You could say Asics buyer are the Fanboys of this companies

[Metroid]

Yeah, multi-million dollar companies should really listen to people online on how to run their company. Specially when the online people call them trolls.

No offense though Metroid, your statement just really sounds too entitled and absurd not to comment on 

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That being said, the article is actually a very good read and was insightful for me as a miner. It makes me wanna sell my GPUs.

Well, if it helps, i think they are right now a much better people than they were before and that means teaching them a lesson and for that I'm truly happy hehe

It makes no sense that if they were bribed by Bitmain that they would develop their own Obelisk miners. Does it? They are also writing about dirty games Bitmain is playing so the article sounds quite sincere to me.

Sia devs need to play the good guys for the community as everybody say and know bitmain is destroying decentralization then is nothing better than to show the whole world they hate bitmain for the business practices. Sia devs want to hide the fact they were bribed and that blog article is perfect to disguise the real purpose of that post.

So as you have believed in what is written in there then the post served its purpose hehe

[fanatic26]

Yet more tinfoil hat bullshit being spewed by trolls. Its kind of sad how low the bar is for information on these forums.

People are so spooked by the truth they have to denounce it as it doesnt fit their personal narrative.


P.S. ASIC does not equal centralization. You can run an ASIC at home as easily as you can a GPU rig.

[FFI2013]

Yet more tinfoil hat bullshit being spewed by trolls. Its kind of sad how low the bar is for information on these forums.

People are so spooked by the truth they have to denounce it as it doesnt fit their personal narrative.


P.S. ASIC does not equal centralization. You can run an ASIC at home as easily as you can a GPU rig.

Agreed but that's not the problem the problem is people who aren't connected or aren't a big farm won't receive their asic until bitmain used it for months and they are bringing bigger and better asics online so spend 2000 or 3000 on a miner that's used and everyone who doesn't think bitmain has a kill switch on your machine better research they've already admitted it so how decentralized is asic mining I don't think it is especially when one manufacturer makes most of the asics and controls a big portion of the hashrate

[Metroid]

P.S. ASIC does not equal centralization. You can run an ASIC at home as easily as you can a GPU rig.

Is not about running, is about the ability to get the asics into their homes + amd or nvidia would never build gpus for their own ambition and then dump on bystanders like bitmain does, if bitmain was a serious company like amd or nvidia and you could get an asic as easily as you get a gpu worldwide then i would agree with you.

[R0mi]

Sia devs need to play the good guys for the community as everybody say and know bitmain is destroying decentralization then is nothing better than to show the whole world they hate bitmain for the business practices. Sia devs want to hide the fact they were bribed and that blog article is perfect to disguise the real purpose of that post.

So as you have believed in what is written in there then the post served its purpose hehe

Vorick isn't the good guy.  "One of the reasons we started Obelisk was because we felt that coin devs in general had a very poor view into the mining world, and that the best way to understand it would be to get our hands dirty and bring a miner to market.  Since starting Obelisk, we’ve learned a lot about the mining space..."  

Yes, indeed.  But at who's expense, I would ask?  A: everyone who purchased an Obelisk miner.  As Vorick mentions a few paragraphs later, "We never found *funding* for the equihash ASICs, and as a result our designs ended up on the shelf."

Vorick knew who Bitmain was before starting Obelisk.  His article mentions being warned about Bitmain from the get-go.  He now credits them openly about being the fastest to market but somehow I don't think this is news to anyone else.  If you want to take on a Titan, one way to do that might be to sneak up on them and release a working product before the Titan has figured out who you are.

But that would require putting your own, or at least a very small group of trustworthy persons, money at risk.  To get lots of other people's money (to fund his learning experience), Vorick had to publicly blog about Obelisk's aspirations.  And once he did that, Bitmain took notice and beat him to market by months.  All of which was foreseeable.

Vorick is still out there selling DOA 5th, and probably soon, 6th batch Obelisks, when not one has yet shipped.

Free learning experience for Vorick; expensive doorstop for customers.  And zero shame about any of it.