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No. Nowadays the big players in mining cryptocurrency have datacenters full of ASIC's. The currencies that are resistant to ASIC mining (due to eg using memory
by dkersten 9y ago
No. Nowadays the big players in mining cryptocurrency have datacenters full of ASIC's. The currencies that are resistant to ASIC mining (due to eg using memory-bound hashing functions), like Monero, are probably just as resistant to GPU mining as they are to ASIC mining, although if you were to investigate it, I'd look at one of those and not bitcoin.
- baq 9y agogaming GPU prices and availability would like to talk with you. where i live, 1070 price has gone up 50% in 6 months - if you manage to get one. it's crazy and was attributed to ethereum/zcash mining.
- dkersten 9y agoA similar thing happened when bitcoin GPU mining became big. I was watching an interview recently with one of the large mining operations where they basically bought all of a suppliers GPU stock (of whatever type of card was popular for mining at the time) and couldn't find any other suppliers who weren't out of stock.
- arithma 9y agoThis does not apply to Equihash (ZCash) or DaggerHashimoto. NiceHash consistently mines those on my 2 rigs (3x 1070 GTX rigs.)
- jnwatson 9y agoNo. Making a GPU resistant algorithm is hard. Ethereum is ASIC but not GPU resistant.
- dkersten 9y agoWhy is that? I understand that GPU's have a ton more memory than an ASIC, but couldn't you attach a huge amount of RAM or something to your ASIC (kinda like how GPU's work)?
- imtringued 9y agoThose ASICs will cost as much as GPUs or more for the same amount of performance.
- dkersten 9y agoThanks! Although, since an ASIC is application specific, couldn't you pack more cores (since you can ignore the circuitry that you don't need) or otherwise optimise for the application? If you can do more work, or do the same amount of work with less energy, then it could still be worth it. I am obviously ignoring a rather important factor: its unlikely a "small" player could make a more performant ASIC than a "big" player like the GPU vendors, who have invested billions into building high performance hardware in a cost effective way. I'm not really asking "why don't people do this", but rather asking if its possible at all given a big enough budget.