4 ms·

For some reason Dogecoin, Litecoin, and all the other scrypt-based cryptocurrencies use extremely low N and r parameters, such that computing a hash only needs

• raverbashing 10y ago
  Maybe using a harder hash does not incentivize people mining it, reducing its growth and liquidity?
  • erik 10y ago
    I'm under the impression that the Litecoin creators thought that scrypt would prevent ASIC miners, but they still wanted to be able to GPU mine, so they used low difficulty parameters. Which of course led to ASIC miners being implemented. Then Dogecoin just copied Litecoin directly.
    • cloudjacker 10y ago
      > thought that scrypt would prevent ASIC miners, I'm still amazed that people believed that. We've been pushing general purpose CPU's for decades because there is nothing novel or hard about making single purpose processors. I didn't realize you could just say random computing terms and people would believe you. "This is memory hard so therefore no ASIC (single purpose processor) could be made because memory is expensive" I like cryptocurrency but 2012-2014 was seriously like being on crazy pills listening to the fans.
      • wmf 10y ago
        To be fair, memory hardness is a legitimate concept with proofs and everything; Litecoin just made a mistake in their design. ZCash is giving it a second try, taking into account improvements that have been made over the last few years.
• tromp 10y ago
  They needed to, in order to make the proof-of-work cheap to verify. See my blog post http://cryptorials.io/beyond-hashcash-proof-work-theres-mining-hashing http://cryptorials.io/beyond-hashcash-proof-work-theres-mini... on how asymmetric PoW avoid this handicap.