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What does the author mean by ASIC resistence here?
by zurn 9y ago
What does the author mean by ASIC resistence here?
- mbilker 9y agoThe algorithm used by the coin is prohibitively expensive or provides little to no increase in performance compared to GPUs.
- NamTaf 9y agoI'm only tangentially familiar with it so someone else please correct me if I'm wrong. Etherium requires a significant memory footprint to compute, whereas BTC and LTC do not. As such, an ASIC was able to have a heap of compute power but very little memory and it'd crunch through as much hashing as a GPU with far less upfront cost. Etherium on the other hand requires lots of memory, so to add on the memory to the ASIC you essentially kill its competitiveness against a mass-produced GPU from a capital investment point of view.
- pawadu 9y agoWasn't LTC also claimed to be GPU and ASIC proof due to its high memory usage?
- Tuna-Fish 9y agoLTC had a high memory use compared to bitcoin, but ASICs caught up to it. Ethereum is designed to have high and increasing memory use, to make it a moving target that is hard to hit with anything more cost-efficient than a GPU.
- itsnotlupus 9y agoMining algorithms that have aspects that are thought to be harder/more expensive to implement as ASIC chips. For example, Ethereum implements a number of tactics to achieve that: - relatively large memory size and bandwidth requirements. - linearly growing memory requirements over time. - announced plans to deprecate mining altogether and switch to proof-of-stake, turning all specialized hardware into pumpkins when it happens. I don't know that it's necessarily enough to make ASIC miners impossible, but it seems to have had some success at keeping the bulk of the mining on GPUs, longer than some of its peers.
- wtallis 9y agoSome hash functions (eg. scrypt) are designed to make ASIC implementations cost-prohibitive, such as by requiring enough memory that off-chip DRAM working memory is needed. When the memory interface is the bottleneck, an ASIC is not going to offer substantial advantages over GPUs.
- idonotknowwhy 9y agoBut in the end, we got scrypt ASIC miners anyway. And then a coin called Vertcoin (VTC) came along and replaced scrypt with X11, to fight ASICs
- pygy_ 9y agoIIRC the litecoin folks choose bad scrypt parameters, susceptible to custom circuits.
- egeozcan 9y agoDoes anyone know why they fight ASICs?
- idonotknowwhy 9y agoYeah. Officially it's to avoid centralization. The idea is that anyone can mine the coins, not just rich people with ASIC mining farms. They also wanted to avoid GPUs originally, and some new altcoins (also known as shitcoins) try to do this as well from time to time. I've been known to either cloud-mine or what I call "Indian-data-center" mine such coins. I personally like it when a new CPU-only or GPU-only coin comes out because I can mine with my own hardware. My ASIC miner never made ROI before the Bitcoin difficulty got to high that it would never pay back the power bill costs.
- zurn 9y agoIt would be cool if such "GPU resistant" coins became popular, because it would encourage people to figure out new ways to program GPUs.
- siberianbear 9y agoBitcoin uses a hashing algorithm called SHA256. This algorithm is easily implemented in hardware and is very parallelizeable. It's a simple pipeline with some adds, rotations, bit shifts, xors, etc. Once people started to build ASICs to mine Bitcoin, GPU mining simply wasn't competetive. There are many other types of hashing algorithms, many of which aren't as easily pipeline-able. For instance, if a hashing algorithm requires a few megabytes of memory, than making a custom ASIC isn't going to have such a slam-dunk advantage over a GPU.