2 ms·
The investment in energy-intensive GPUs will also serve as a disincentive for any change to Bitcoin that does not require energy-intensive GPUs, which will lock
by philipodonnell 9y ago
The investment in energy-intensive GPUs will also serve as a disincentive for any change to Bitcoin that does not require energy-intensive GPUs, which will lock us into this paradigm until something drastic happens.
EDIT: I stand corrected as to the terminology, but if you replace [GPUs] with [POW hardware], the disincentive will remain.
- jnbiche 9y agoNo one has seriously mined Bitcoin using GPUs since like 2013. By 2014, everyone was using FPGAs or ASICs. Now, only ASICs are used.
- philipodonnell 9y agoI thought there was a change to the protocol that prevented ASICs from being as effective? Perhaps I misunderstood in the context of Bitcoin, but in the context of the investment in GPUs providing support to pricing, I think that is validated just from the news a few days ago that GPU pricing because of crypto demand was causing pricing issues in PC-gaming. And the same principle should apply to whatever "effort-based" mining technology is in use; any significant investment in hardware will be a disincentive to allowing improvements in the efficiency of said hardware.
- Karrot_Kream 9y agoA lot of altcoins have come up that are ASIC-resistant. A lot of these use memory as a bound, but GPUs sill have the memory bandwidth to make mining fast.
- philipodonnell 9y agoI must have mixed up some notes about ASIC-resistant altcoins with some older info about Bitcoin, its quite difficult to keep track.
- dlubarov 9y agoBitcoin is still using (and probably will always use) SHA-256 as the proof of work problem, which ASICs are great for since it takes negligible memory.
- asdfqwerutoe 9y agoXMR/ETH use GPU