Will bitcoin ASIC mining lead to litecoin or namecoin adoption ?

[Bitcoin Oz]

It seems to me if GPU or FPGA will be useless mining bitcoin that they might look at mining on alt chains provided there is some return rather than selling the cards. Can you mine alt coins with an ASIC ? It seems if theres a change in the algo they are useless ?

[grimd34th]

It seems to me if GPU or FPGA will be useless mining bitcoin that they might look at mining on alt chains provided there is some return rather than selling the cards. Can you mine alt coins with an ASIC ? It seems if theres a change in the algo they are useless ?

but namecoin isnt a change in algo last time i checked, it was just a seperate chain

[nedbert9]

It seems to me if GPU or FPGA will be useless mining bitcoin that they might look at mining on alt chains provided there is some return rather than selling the cards. Can you mine alt coins with an ASIC ? It seems if theres a change in the algo they are useless ?

but namecoin isnt a change in algo last time i checked, it was just a seperate chain

Interesting.  Seems if a minority do merged mining then using ASICs for namecoin could have very interesting returns.

[Bitcoin Oz]

Can you even merge mine using ASIC's ?

[vapourminer]

Can you even merge mine using ASIC's ?

sure. the merged mining part is done on the pool side. just point your gpu/fpga/asic/quantumwhammomatic/whatever at a merged mining pool, it does the rest.

[Bitcoin Oz]

Can you even merge mine using ASIC's ?

sure. the merged mining part is done on the pool side. just point your gpu/fpga/asic/quantumwhammomatic/whatever at a merged mining pool, it does the rest.

What do ASIC mine scrypt like ?

[caston]

I have been buying up LTC on the speculation that GPU rigs will start mining litecoin once ASICs increase the difficulty of BTC.

[bulanula]

I have been buying up LTC on the speculation that GPU rigs will start mining litecoin once ASICs increase the difficulty of BTC.

HOLY MOLY !

I think you might be onto something here mate !!!

Thanks for the tip !

[Bitcoin Oz]

I have been buying up LTC on the speculation that GPU rigs will start mining litecoin once ASICs increase the difficulty of BTC.

Great minds think alike   

[Bitcoin Oz]

The adoption of ASIC by bitcoin miners will push GPU and fpga miners somewhere else. My thinking is it will be litecoin because namecoin is merge mined.

Protip: Buy/Mine all the  litecoins you can before October.

[smoothie]

The adoption of ASIC by bitcoin miners will push GPU and fpga miners somewhere else. My thinking is it will be litecoin because namecoin is merge mined.

Protip: Buy/Mine all the  litecoins you can before October.

+1 Agreed. I think you will see a rise in price for litecoins over the next 12 months.

[Wnd]

The adoption of ASIC by bitcoin miners will push GPU and fpga miners somewhere else. My thinking is it will be litecoin because namecoin is merge mined.

Protip: Buy/Mine all the  litecoins you can before October.

+1 Agreed. I think you will see a rise in price for litecoins over the next 12 months.

You won't see 1 cent increase unless they make Silkroad for litecoin.

[Bitcoin Oz]

The adoption of ASIC by bitcoin miners will push GPU and fpga miners somewhere else. My thinking is it will be litecoin because namecoin is merge mined.

Protip: Buy/Mine all the  litecoins you can before October.

+1 Agreed. I think you will see a rise in price for litecoins over the next 12 months.

You won't see 1 cent increase unless they make Silkroad for litecoin.

Now theres an idea....

[tatsuchan]

The adoption of ASIC by bitcoin miners will push GPU and fpga miners somewhere else. My thinking is it will be litecoin because namecoin is merge mined.

Protip: Buy/Mine all the  litecoins you can before October.

+1 Agreed. I think you will see a rise in price for litecoins over the next 12 months.

You won't see 1 cent increase unless they make Silkroad for litecoin.

Now theres an idea....

Make something better.  How about Litecoin amateur dentist/surgeon.  Get your titties lifted and your final lady-boy transformation done without all those pesky rules.  Maybe sell some organs too.  How much is a kidney worth in Litecoins?

[Bitcoin Oz]

The adoption of ASIC by bitcoin miners will push GPU and fpga miners somewhere else. My thinking is it will be litecoin because namecoin is merge mined.

Protip: Buy/Mine all the  litecoins you can before October.

+1 Agreed. I think you will see a rise in price for litecoins over the next 12 months.

You won't see 1 cent increase unless they make Silkroad for litecoin.

Now theres an idea....

Make something better.  How about Litecoin amateur dentist/surgeon.  Get your titties lifted and your final lady-boy transformation done without all those pesky rules.  Maybe sell some organs too.  How much is a kidney worth in Litecoins?

They are about 40 grand in USD so "a lot of ltc"

[enmaku]

I can't speak for adoption rates but I can speak to whether ASICs can be used on alternate chains.

Any ASIC built to mine on the Bitcoin network can also mine any altcoin for which the algorithm(s) have not been changed. Since Namecoin uses the same algorithms as Bitcoin, Bitcoin ASICs should be able to mine Namecoins - the vast majority of the altcoins didn't change algorithms, actually, so the same is true for them. There are a handful of altcoins, Litecoin and Tenebrix included, which moved to scrypt() as a replacement of sha256() for one step in the process. ASICs won't work for scrypt-based altcoins, nor is it likely that ASICs can or will be built for them: the entire point of scrypt and bcrypt was to make a difficult-to-accelerate algorithm, and by design the amount of die space an scrypt ASIC would take makes it prohibitively expensive even beyond normal ASIC manufacturing costs.

[Litecoin]

I can't speak for adoption rates but I can speak to whether ASICs can be used on alternate chains.

Any ASIC built to mine on the Bitcoin network can also mine any altcoin for which the algorithm(s) have not been changed. Since Namecoin uses the same algorithms as Bitcoin, Bitcoin ASICs should be able to mine Namecoins - the vast majority of the altcoins didn't change algorithms, actually, so the same is true for them. There are a handful of altcoins, Litecoin and Tenebrix included, which moved to scrypt() as a replacement of sha256() for one step in the process. ASICs won't work for scrypt-based altcoins, nor is it likely that ASICs can or will be built for them: the entire point of scrypt and bcrypt was to make a difficult-to-accelerate algorithm, and by design the amount of die space an scrypt ASIC would take makes it prohibitively expensive even beyond normal ASIC manufacturing costs.

Great input. But would it be possible to use FPGA's for Litecoins? Can it be configured or modified for Litecoins?
Its very hard to believe that CPU's and GPU's are going to be the best for scrypt-based hashing.

[Bitcoin Oz]

I can't speak for adoption rates but I can speak to whether ASICs can be used on alternate chains.

Any ASIC built to mine on the Bitcoin network can also mine any altcoin for which the algorithm(s) have not been changed. Since Namecoin uses the same algorithms as Bitcoin, Bitcoin ASICs should be able to mine Namecoins - the vast majority of the altcoins didn't change algorithms, actually, so the same is true for them. There are a handful of altcoins, Litecoin and Tenebrix included, which moved to scrypt() as a replacement of sha256() for one step in the process. ASICs won't work for scrypt-based altcoins, nor is it likely that ASICs can or will be built for them: the entire point of scrypt and bcrypt was to make a difficult-to-accelerate algorithm, and by design the amount of die space an scrypt ASIC would take makes it prohibitively expensive even beyond normal ASIC manufacturing costs.

Great input. But would it be possible to use FPGA's for Litecoins? Can it be configured or modified for Litecoins?
Its very hard to believe that CPU's and GPU's are going to be the best for scrypt-based hashing.

I imagine so as they are programmeable. Has anyone tried to use them for litecoin yet ?

[tacotime]

Scrypt is easily mined by anything with high integer processing power and high memory bandwidth... The latter is most often lacked by fpga devices like we see used to mine bitcoin. As high memory bandwidth is very important to gpus for 3d applications, gpus will probably remain better than anything else for hashing Scrypt in the next long while. For instance, the spartan 6 fpgas have memory bandwidth amounts an order of magnitude smaller than current generation amd gpus.

[enmaku]

I can't speak for adoption rates but I can speak to whether ASICs can be used on alternate chains.

Any ASIC built to mine on the Bitcoin network can also mine any altcoin for which the algorithm(s) have not been changed. Since Namecoin uses the same algorithms as Bitcoin, Bitcoin ASICs should be able to mine Namecoins - the vast majority of the altcoins didn't change algorithms, actually, so the same is true for them. There are a handful of altcoins, Litecoin and Tenebrix included, which moved to scrypt() as a replacement of sha256() for one step in the process. ASICs won't work for scrypt-based altcoins, nor is it likely that ASICs can or will be built for them: the entire point of scrypt and bcrypt was to make a difficult-to-accelerate algorithm, and by design the amount of die space an scrypt ASIC would take makes it prohibitively expensive even beyond normal ASIC manufacturing costs.

Great input. But would it be possible to use FPGA's for Litecoins? Can it be configured or modified for Litecoins?
Its very hard to believe that CPU's and GPU's are going to be the best for scrypt-based hashing.

FPGAs are essentially programmable ASICs, the only meaningful difference is size and price point. FPGAs tend to be larger than ASICs and cost much more per chip. ASICs tend to be smaller and cheaper than FPGAs but you can't purchase just one, minimum order size tends to be massive because the manufacturing process has huge initial costs - once those initial costs are outlaid, however, they become quite cheap to re-manufacture new batches of. The only reason ASICs are just starting to hit the Bitcoin market is because it's taken this long for someone to amass and be willing to front that initial cost.

In short, if you can do it with an ASIC you can probably do it with an FPGA (some slight limitations/differences, but none that important). Scrypt, and therefore Litecoin, is highly resistant to GPU, FPGA and ASIC acceleration because of its high memory requirements. See this StackExchange question for more details: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/q/1305/22