Hardware Specific Mining

[piuser57]

Hello there!

I am looking for advice on a question I have; is it possible for a coin to be hardware specific. Eg could a coin be made that can only be mined on the Raspberry Pi and if it is possible could you provide links? I have searched but not found anything relevant.

I understand most people want a coin that can mine on anything, I am thinking more about the 'fun' side of things.

Thanks

[novello]

Hello there!

I am looking for advice on a question I have; is it possible for a coin to be hardware specific. Eg could a coin be made that can only be mined on the Raspberry Pi and if it is possible could you provide links? I have searched but not found anything relevant.

I understand most people want a coin that can mine on anything, I am thinking more about the 'fun' side of things.

Thanks

It's unlikely, indeed almost impossible as any crypto coin will rely on general mathematical functions rather than the instruction set of a particular processor. Any coin can be mined on a Pi or any other general purpose computer, trouble is that said computers are too slow to mine effectively nowadays.

Taking your comment about people wanting a coin that can mine on anything, what you really need is a device with something like 256 'cores' each with it's own RISC processor, 128 Mb RAM, ROM containing a basic operating system and dual SHA256 co-processors.  Each of these blocks would take up something like 0.8 square millimetres on a 28nm process, so 256 of them on single die is perfectly feasible (possibly even 512). Such a general purpose array could mine just about anything you like, but it wouldn't be the optimum for many coins, particularly bitcoin.

Power consumption is of course another matter!

Anyone else like to take up this subject?

[piuser57]

Thank you for your reply! I think you may have prompted the answer in my mind - if the coin was using specific instructions from the ARM processor, it would be restricted in that sense, however people could still get around this using similar systems (like Hackintosh running Mac on generic PC).

I really like your fpga idea.

[novello]

Thank you for your reply! I think you may have prompted the answer in my mind - if the coin was using specific instructions from the ARM processor, it would be restricted in that sense, however people could still get around this using similar systems (like Hackintosh running Mac on generic PC).

I really like your fpga idea.

Thanks, but you'd never get 256 core on an FPGA - it would have to be an asic. It's an interesting idea though, isn't it? With sufficient volume sales behind it from miners of different coins it could be made reasonably cheaply. Need to look into this a bit more, I think.