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People use custom silicon, ASIC:s, designed to only run SHA256 mining. Almost nobody uses GPU:s. There as are so called multipools that tell its miner clients
by Natanael_L 10y ago
People use custom silicon, ASIC:s, designed to only run SHA256 mining. Almost nobody uses GPU:s.
There as are so called multipools that tell its miner clients to mine on whatever blockchain is currently most profitable. I can imagine merging this with a paid version of BOINC.
That would only be used by the "GPU coin miners", those in blockchains using ASIC resistant PoW like scrypt instead of SHA256.
- daveguy 10y agoWhy is scrypt ASIC resistant? If it is an algorithm hardware can be designed to implement the algorithm, right? It took a few years for people to start making bitcoin ASICs, but it happened. What would prevent the same for scrypt given enough financial incentive?
- Natanael_L 10y agoBecause it requires expensive components (lots of RAM) and doesn't significantly outperform a regular CPU / GPU.
- Taek 10y agoAnother hot topic. Many experts believe that ASIC resistance is a futile endeavor for the reasons you listed. But designing a worthwhile SHA ASIC is certainly a lot easier/cheaper than designing a worthwhile scrypt ASIC. Worth noting, there are actually scrypt ASICs already, for litecoin and dogecoin at least. Ethereum and Zcash both tried to make asic resistant hashing algorithms. So far they have held up. Ethereum has a hardfork history though and also is trying to move to PoS. Given the cost of developing asics, I'm guessing most manufacturers aren't willing to risk that ethereum could just hardfork to invalidate the hardware, destroying the investment. We will see, but I'm guessing the Zcash algo will see asics within 2 years if the coin sees successful adoption.