SolidCoin v2.0 features new hashing algorithm, faster on CPUs

[Syke]

(If there was nothing CPUs do best, why would be using them?)

Sure, CPUs do all sorts of things better than GPUs. CPUs are great at managing interrupts from multiple devices like USB, PCI, etc. CPUs are great at managing memory spaces, protecting system resources from other threads of execution. And so on. None of those have anything to do with hashing algorithms that make the blockchain secure.

The beauty of the Bitcoin hashing system is the asymetric nature combined with robust security. Incredible amount of computing power to find a hash, but trivial to verify the hash. I suspect that this new SC "design" is going to mess it up.

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[worldinacoin]

I would love to volunteer to be a beta tester.  Cheers!

[CoinHunter]

(If there was nothing CPUs do best, why would be using them?)

Sure, CPUs do all sorts of things better than GPUs. CPUs are great at managing interrupts from multiple devices like USB, PCI, etc. CPUs are great at managing memory spaces, protecting system resources from other threads of execution. And so on. None of those have anything to do with hashing algorithms that make the blockchain secure.

The beauty of the Bitcoin hashing system is the asymetric nature combined with robust security. Incredible amount of computing power to find a hash, but trivial to verify the hash. I suspect that this new SC "design" is going to mess it up.

The final hash of the SC2.0 system is a SHA256. This means the security is the same as in Bitcoin, it's just done differently to get there. The reason why I decided to stick with SHA256 as the final hash is it's known to work well as a difficulty modifier. So I'm not quite sure what you're talking about in regards to "Security". The worst case if my new "algorithm" is broken is a faster way to generate hashes. Making hashes faster does not equal a broken system, or Bitcoin could be considered broken since a modern CPU can do nearly 2 million hashes per second.

A modern CPU can do 20000-35000 SC2.0 hashes per second per core. No node is receiving that many blocks to verify a second.

[CoinHunter]

I would love to volunteer to be a beta tester.  Cheers!

Hi just keep an eye on the official forum or IRC channel for the public beta testnet. Although I will likely also post about it here (no guarantees though).

[mtbitcoin]

I am not sure if this has considered, but any Xcoin without some kind of solid (no pun intended) 51% protection that relies solely on CPU hashing would be at risk due to the availability of cheap cloud instances (i.e EC2, etc)

[CoinHunter]

I am not sure if this has considered, but any Xcoin without some kind of solid (no pun intended) 51% protection that relies solely on CPU hashing would be at risk due to the availability of cheap cloud instances (i.e EC2, etc)

Every existing p2p crypto currency network isn't safe under a variety of situations when it comes to 51% control. SolidCoin 2.0 is likely going to be the only one which has protection against such things without centralization.

However by making SolidCoin accessible to more people (as more people have CPUs than hashing GPUs ) network balance should be better as it gives you more mining users spread out across the world.

[becoin]

... SC version 2.0 SlowCoin for the masses

Every cryptographic currency should be made for the masses or in the current conditions it has no chance to succeed. CPU or GPU mining is much more important than people might think. Verifying the proof of work is just like voting/accepting its validity. What kind of voting system do we want to have in place? Vote = decision maker/CPU or vote = worker(slave)/GPU? Do we want to live in a society where 1 person = 1 vote or do we want our voting power to depend on how many workers/slaves do we have?

[gyverlb]

... SC version 2.0 SlowCoin for the masses

Every cryptographic currency should be made for the masses or in the current conditions it has no chance to succeed. CPU or GPU mining is much more important than people might think. Verifying the proof of work is just like voting/accepting its validity. What kind of voting system do we want to have in place? Vote = decision maker/CPU or vote = worker(slave)/GPU? Do we want to live in a society where 1 person = 1 vote or do we want our voting power to depend on how many workers/slaves do we have?

Irrelevant : if a chain prefers CPUs, people with faster/more CPU cores will have more voting power.

In fact I would probably be one of the most favored people as I own or rent several servers with beefy CPUs (currently they total ~80-100MH/s as electrical costs are fixed for those so it doesn't cost me anything more when they mine).

Tying voting power to any computation can't be fair : it's more or less a "vote with your wallet" system (not democracy by far, but maybe better than chaos).

[becoin]

Irrelevant : if a chain prefers CPUs, people with faster/more CPU cores will have more voting power.

There is no absolute democracy but still there are systems that are more democratic than others. Why are some systems more democratic than others despite that all they are based on 1 person = 1 vote? Because they create geometrically growing difficulty for a decision-maker to purchase/hire votes! This is why a chain that prefers CPUs is more 'democratic' than a chain that prefers GPUs.

as electrical costs are fixed for those so it doesn't cost me anything more when they mine

Exactly. Electrical cost (in terms of kWh) should be fixed so every miner knows exactly how many hashes will their CPU or group of CPUs generate per kW.

Some 15 years ago Sir Arthur Clarke predicted that in the near future the world reserve currency will be kWh or some other unit of energy. The only reason we don't yet have this is we still can't find a way to cheaply store electricity ('storage of value' function)... Until we figure this out, whatever we use as a currency, it should be closely fixed to the cost of kWh. If we lose this dependency out of sight we lose the reasoning behind every future monetary system!

[dree12]

... SC version 2.0 SlowCoin for the masses

Every cryptographic currency should be made for the masses or in the current conditions it has no chance to succeed. CPU or GPU mining is much more important than people might think. Verifying the proof of work is just like voting/accepting its validity. What kind of voting system do we want to have in place? Vote = decision maker/CPU or vote = worker(slave)/GPU? Do we want to live in a society where 1 person = 1 vote or do we want our voting power to depend on how many workers/slaves do we have?

Irrelevant : if a chain prefers CPUs, people with faster/more CPU cores will have more voting power.

In fact I would probably be one of the most favored people as I own or rent several servers with beefy CPUs (currently they total ~80-100MH/s as electrical costs are fixed for those so it doesn't cost me anything more when they mine).

Tying voting power to any computation can't be fair : it's more or less a "vote with your wallet" system (not democracy by far, but maybe better than chaos).

Are conjoined twins one or two people? Tying votes to brains or bodies isn't fair either, but we still do it. People under 18 are even forbidden to vote where I live, so it isn't even fair representation.

[gyverlb]

Irrelevant : if a chain prefers CPUs, people with faster/more CPU cores will have more voting power.

There is no absolute democracy but still there are systems that are more democratic than others. Why are some systems more democratic than others despite that all they are based on 1 person = 1 vote? Because they create geometrically growing difficulty for a decision-maker to purchase/hire votes! This is why a chain that prefers CPUs is more 'democratic' than a chain that prefers GPUs.

Instead of buying GPUs, why people would not simply buy the most cost-effective CPU+motherboard combination, PSU splitters, a big-enough PSU for all the motherboards/CPU and build CPU mining rigs from stacked motherboards? Seems simpler to do than building GPU rigs (one type of components less to buy and lots of software tuning less to do). I don't see where the big difficulty change is for purchasing votes (or earning coins BTW).

as electrical costs are fixed for those so it doesn't cost me anything more when they mine

Exactly. Electrical cost (in terms of kWh) should be fixed so every miner knows exactly how many hashes will their CPU or group of CPUs generate per kW.

I didn't think much about it but I'll probably agree with the conclusion. That said, quoting me and starting with "Exactly" shows you didn't really read what I wrote: it has nothing to do with your conclusion.

[sd]

If you want to take an existing algorithm and optimize it for GPU then it's a different story, most things aren't designed to execute 100% in linear order with low latency, so you can break the problem into many. Not so with SolidCoin 2.0

1. If you really can create something that won't run on GPU's or FPGA's you will have created a coin that's begging to be gamed by botnet herders.

2. The plan appears to be to design an algorithm that requires a large number of linear steps. It's going to be sha(sha(sha(sha(sha(sha(sha(sha(sha(sha()))))))))). This can still be implemented on a GPU it will take a larger kernel and will use GPU memory requiring mining rigs to run hotter. This won't prevent 51% attacks anyway.

[becoin]

I don't see where the big difficulty change is for purchasing votes (or earning coins BTW).

It is linear computing against parallel computing. It is single threaded hashing function against multi threaded hashing function. Botnets are concern but shall always be a concern. Much greater concern to me is a single space controlling near 50% of the network hashing power (like deepbit, for instance). By single space I mean mining pools, mining farms, mining syndicates, mining conglomerates or whatever. This should be avoided at any rate. Because this is equivalent to purchasing/hiring votes to the extend of becoming a monopoly if your hashing (voting) power is greater than 50% of the entire network. This is why hashing algo must discourage parallelizing mining tasks by making this process with exponentially growing difficulty if parallel processing is practiced.

[gyverlb]

It is linear computing against parallel computing. It is single threaded hashing function against multi threaded hashing function. Botnets are concern but shall always be a concern. Much greater concern to me is a single space controlling near 50% of the network hashing power (like deepbit, for instance). By single space I mean mining pools, mining farms, mining syndicates, mining conglomerates or whatever. This should be avoided at any rate. Because this is equivalent to purchasing/hiring votes to the extend of becoming a monopoly if your hashing (voting) power is greater than 50% of the entire network. This is why hashing algo must discourage parallelizing mining tasks by making this process with exponentially growing difficulty if parallel processing is practiced.

Sorry doesn't make sense to me. You seem to think that SC will enforce a rule mandating that 2 computers owned by the same person would produce less coins than 2 computers owned by 2 different people. Good luck with that.
Anyway, if you are afraid of pools, just mine with one of the less powerfull ones or p2pool.

[JoelKatz]

Sure, CPUs do all sorts of things better than GPUs. CPUs are great at managing interrupts from multiple devices like USB, PCI, etc. CPUs are great at managing memory spaces, protecting system resources from other threads of execution. And so on. None of those have anything to do with hashing algorithms that make the blockchain secure.

We add things like interrupt management and memory protection to CPUs because of the way people typically use CPUs. What's fundamental to a CPU is the ability to accelerate random accesses to memory, to make program flow decisions, and so on.

The beauty of the Bitcoin hashing system is the asymetric nature combined with robust security. Incredible amount of computing power to find a hash, but trivial to verify the hash. I suspect that this new SC "design" is going to mess it up.

Typically the hash verification takes place on a CPU anyway. In any event, you could make hash verification take several hundred times more computing power and memory than it requires currently and it would, for practical purposes, make no difference. The only thing you'd need to change is, perhaps, DoS protection against nodes that stream blocks with invalid hashes at you.

[becoin]

You seem to think that SC will enforce a rule mandating that 2 computers owned by the same person would produce less coins than 2 computers owned by 2 different people.

No. 2 computers are just 2 computers. Bitcoin can't make any difference if they are owned by 1 person or by 2 persons. I do believe, however, it is possible hashing algo is changed in a way so that 2 computers mining separately are more productive (resource/result ratio) than 2 computers setup for parallel mining. 3 computers setup for parallel mining is less productive than 2 computers setup for parallel mining and so on.

If you want to include people into play, not just computers, you have to include authentication through security/hardware tokens and PINs. That is, private/public key pairs can be generated for transaction signing if only correct token and accompanying PIN are used. I'm quite confident this is the future for btc, sc and every other examplecoin.

[steelhouse]

Maybe a cpu miner is not the best thing.  It may save electricity, but the future is fpga and asic.  In most parts of California, gpu mining is over for now.  I would prefer no mining.  Sort of like weeds?  All are premined, then bounties are given out.  Maybe have a team leader, with 10 CEOs, those 10 keep a running tab on coin they give out as bounties.   Then just have a 1 reward at about 0.1% inflation rate to combat lost coins.  That would be nice to keep the network strong.  Inflation is evil and bitcoin the present rate is 30% or so.

I think you should take the current solidcoin owners and multiply it by 10 and end the mining.  It does nothing to protect the network, the owners of coin should protect the network.

[Lolcust]

Well, all I can say is that I hereby officially testify that CPU-friendly/GPU-hostile miner design is possible   

[CoinHunter]

I already knew it was possible but thanks for getting artforz to help me show others before the big SC 2.0 release. What's your next coin going to be? Something else I propose or?

[Lolcust]

I already knew it was possible but thanks for getting artforz to help me show others before the big SC 2.0 release. What's your next coin going to be? Something else I propose or?

Maybe, depends on whether the proposal is sound.

But, I humbly suspect that the idea (and, consequentially, the "proposal") of "CPU-friendly / GPU hostile" mining existed quite since before this thread, however, your seemingly unrivaled ability to catalyze discussion was necessary for issue to gain enough momentum for kind people like ArtForz to pay some attention to it and make a nice reference implementation