4 ms·

Unless we come up with newer more efficient algorithms and specialized hardware for implementing AI.

• talldayo 2y ago
  glances at Bitcoin mining ASICs Any day, now.
  • jncfhnb 2y ago
    Bitcoin is definitionally inefficient to mine. That’s the whole point.
    • talldayo 2y ago
      The point is that difficulty is adjusted in accordance with network saturation to prevent a 51% attack. The network is not inherently inefficient unless you're attempting to monopolize it - you are still rewarded for using more efficient mining methods than your competitors. Which leads us to the GPUs. For a while everyone said ASICs (and the courageous ones, FPGAs) were the future of mining because they were inherently more efficient than GPU hardware could ever be. But it turns out that it's the other way around - mass-manufactured GPUs have access to more efficient silicon than any FPGA on the market could hope for. Similarly, AI chips that want to beat Nvidia on efficiency terms first have to climb a mountain of power usage that is inherent to their exponentially less-dense hardware.
      • yitternet 2y ago
        I think it dpends on the PoW system used. On a basic level you have memory hardening, and that can be used to force usage of bulk memory on GPUs or bulk storage like with Chia. For the more complex PoW you can use speculative execution to make CPUs most performant like RandomX. With bitcoin its more arbitrary but you can see how they could hard-fork to a different hardware-favoring system if desired.
        • talldayo 2y ago
          With Bitcoin specifically, I literally cannot imagine a serious number of people considering a hard-fork that removes the sole reason it's attractive as a currency.
      • rcxdude 2y ago
        The observation is that even if you get better at mining, all that happens is that the miners start to put in the same amount of effort but using the new technique: calculating hashes with less power or faster doesn't actually improve the resource usage of bitcoin, because the resource usage is tied to the rewards given to miners, not to the actual act of mining. (Importantly, it's not tied to the value of an attack! Nothing about bitcoin's now-ossified design actually ensures any particular level of resistance to attack, other than at the moment it's "very high" because there's still quite expensive coins being mined and people buying them) And the CPU/GPU/FPGA/ASIC thing is something that depends on the proof-of-work. Bitcoin went for the naive solution and it meant ASICs were the optimal solution once a certain amount of income was available. Later cryptocurrencies learned from this and specifically designed their proof of work systems to be optimal on a GPU, or even a CPU, because making ASICs the optimal solution is generally pretty bad if you want a diversity of miners.