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Litecoin [LTC] X11 hardfork at block 564,480
- lucb1e 13y agoYesterday something about Auroracoin (never heard of it before), now Litecoin is undergoing some big change, and meanwhile the value of my bitcoins went down 10% overnight. Can anyone explain to me what is happening? Why does anyone care about Auroracoin and a Litecoin protocol change and why does it drive another cryptocurrency's value down?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- JimmyM 13y agoI'd assume that some people are unable to cash out of Auroracoin directly, so they dumped AUR for BTC before people on the crypto markets were aware of what was happening. This didn't drive the price of BTC up, but when they cashed out into USD it drove the price of BTC down. Alternatively, the events might not be related. Cryptos are very volatile.
- smtddr 13y ago* Apparently the Auroracoin thing was actually a planned fork. * This Litecoin thing appears to be some random person with no authority trying to make stuff happen. * Bitcoin price is falling because news is claiming banks in China must close all accounts related to bitcoin-businesses by April 15th. I don't know if it's true or not, but I'm not panic-selling my coins.
- lucb1e 13y agoThanks!
- purplezky 13y agoso this hardforks into a new currency and you can still sell LTC on an exchange which still supports it. Sounds like built in double spent.
- Bootvis 13y agoThat won't happen, the exchange will be on only one of the two branches and thus will only accept transactions on that branch. So double spends are not possible unless the exchanges switches branch at some future time.
- SwellJoe 13y agoThere's nothing stopping an exchange from offering LTC and LTC X11. Once the fork happens, there will be two clients on separate block chains. I guess when this fork happens, I'll have a handful of LTC X11, and I guess I'll dump them for BTC at whatever bargain price they're selling for, as I can't imagine how this could end well.
- FatalLogic 13y ago>a new currency That's the answer to your question. It really is a new currency, but everyone with Litecoins gets an amount of the new currency equal to their Litecoin stake. After that, Litecoin and Litecoin X11 are separate entities, which will not have the same price. Possibly Litecoin X11 will be worthless, if it doesn't get much support. Like any digital currency of this kind, it will be worth whatever people are willing to pay for it. Exchanges will have to opt in to accept Litecoin X11, as a separate currency from Litecoin.
- sliverstorm 13y agoOr, if the buy-in is significant, Litecoin goes the way of the DoDo and Litecoin X11 replaces it under the Litecoin moniker.
- FatalLogic 13y agoThat's possible, although it's less likely because if the X11 fork won, then there's a chance the project would lose the original Litecoin developers. That would be very disruptive, and would probably pull the price down, and that is a risk which may deter some people from using the X11 fork.
- arbus 13y ago> We don't need the Litecoin developers. > We need the majority to support this to make this hardfork work. This is a pretty interesting comment from the person who is proposing the fork. I wonder how the currency will split if a sizable amount of people switch to this method of mining? Will the devs be forced to accept their fork or will this just split off into a litecoin 2.0 that is ASIC resistant which previously mined coins grandfathered into this new fork
- sliverstorm 13y agoEither outcome could happen. The devs can stick with the old fork, they can move to the new one. To my knowledge there's no reason 2 litecoin networks can't exist at the same time, aside from being inconvenient & confusing.
- arbus 13y agoCould this lead to double spend scenerios? For example, I have 10 LTC on the current system and these guys fork to form a new network. Can I then spend the 10 LTC I have twice, once on their new network and once on the old network?
- antocv 13y agoHow can that site break so much on mobile devices/small screens, wth completely unreadable. How do they do that escape from view effect?
- sktrdie 13y agoIsn't it just a matter of time that someone will make ASICs also for X11? To me any type of algorithm can eventually be implemented in an ASIC. Perhaps some algorithms take longer than others, but it's just a matter of time.
- lawl 13y agoThey mentioned in the thread that this will indeed happen. But it will take at least 1.5-2 years at which point they just want to change the algo again. See: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=549572.msg5981748#msg5981748 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=549572.msg5981748#ms...
- wes-exp 13y agoASIC inevitability is a falsehood. Software can be modified very quickly, whereas hardware requires much longer development cycles. Software can always outpace hardware, if the community is willing to commit to ASIC resistance by changing the software.
- raverbashing 13y agoThat's why FPGAs exist And I'm sure existing ASICS can be adapted to new algorithms, they're developed in VHDL/Verilog, surely, not as easily as changing an FPGA, still, it won't be a work from scratch.
- Bootvis 13y agoThey have to be build though, which is expensive. If the hashing algorithm is parameterized by the block number in some smart way it will be harder to deploy them. For example, one could use 10 different algorithms and choose a new one every block. The ASIC will only work 10% of the time but this can be implemented on the GPU. I agree that FPGA resistance is much harder to achieve.
- wes-exp 13y agoGive me a break. FPGAs aren't even useful for Scrypt (due to memory bandwidth requirements, as I understand it). ASICs have to go through a manufacturing cycle. Software doesn't. It is plainly obvious that software can move faster than hardware.
- pera 13y agoWhat is X11?
- Bootvis 13y agoIt is a combination of hashing algo's[1]: "X11 consists of the following algorithms: blake, bmw, groestl, jh, keccak, skein, luffa, cubehash, shavite, simd, and echo." [1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/21bely/have_you_already_heard_of_x11_hashing_algorithm/ http://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/21bely/have_...
- pera 13y agoYeah that's the only thing I found about it, but who created this, where is the specifications, tests, etc. This looks like someone took many different hash functions and for some reason thinks it's "anti-ASIC"...
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- raverbashing 13y agoI don't know what's the X11 protocol, but to think a protocol can be "ASIC resistant" looks naive Scrypt has a bigger memory footprint, but ASICs can work with more memory, no problem Not to mention decreasing mineability may end up isolating their fork (causing their value to go down)
- thirsteh 13y agoThe point of scrypt isn't really to be "ASIC-resistant", but to make it much more expensive to build ASICs to efficiently reverse its outputs.
- raverbashing 13y agoI haven't heard any explanation why this would be so Ok, this explains a little bit about X11 http://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/21bely/have_you_already_heard_of_x11_hashing_algorithm/ http://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/21bely/have_... But whatever a GPU can do, a properly designed ASIC can do as well It seems they're counting on implementation time for new ASICs for this algorithm.
- thirsteh 13y agoIndeed. They seem to be switching out and tunable unpredictable memory access (i.e. have to spend a lot of money building an ASIC with a lot of die area -- see the scrypt paper to understand why: https://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt/scrypt.pdf https://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt/scrypt.pdf) for a faster but more "obfuscated" construction. The circuit needed to implement this will be more complex, but it will be much cheaper to mass-produce. In short, this is what happens when people who know nothing about cryptography try to sell their unexamined constructions.
- smtddr 13y ago>>I don't know what's the X11 protocol, but to think a protocol can be "ASIC resistant" looks naive. Maybe you shouldn't claim something to be naive when you don't know anything about it?
- sprash 13y agoWhy not use Primecoin or Riecoin algorithms? Those won't work on GPUs/ASICS either and produce some actual scientific value.
- tromp 13y agoOnly two downsides: 1) The existing algorithms for finding prime chains or clusters are rather involved, and people may keep superior algorithms private. 2) They're not very botnet-resistant.
- sliverstorm 13y agoPoint #1 is actually kind of exciting to me.
- tromp 13y agoYes, as an algorithm designer myself, I can see the attraction:-) I'd make a bad competitive miner though, as I'd be too eager to publish my optimizations, and get some recognition for that...
- enko 13y agoI don't see what the point of this is? ASICs are actually good; they perform the necessary proof of work while using a lot less power. Running all those GPUs is a needless waste. It sounds like this is just some GPU owners wanting to turn back time to protect their assets.
- gedrap 13y agoI guess the idea is to let a regular Joe to mine some coins too, so that he doesn't have to invest a few grands.
- enko 13y agoIf we're going to do that, why not get rid of GPUs, too. ASICs are merely an efficiency increase, just like GPUs were. I somehow suspect, however, the proponents of this change are not "regular joes", who might have an intel HD2000 in their laptop. And if we're going to play the "democratising" card, with GPU mining it's a lottery of where you happen to live - electricity prices vary wildly around the globe. ASICs help to take that out of the equation, so if anything they're more "democratic"!
- cmyr 13y agoyes, ASICs have finally brought the altcoin game within reach of the world's poor.
- enko 13y agoAs much as $2000 GPU mining boxes have? To go with their 50c+/kwh electricity prices? Yes, yes they have.
- sliverstorm 13y agoAs I discussed in another comment, we could get rid of GPUs too, but first you have to find a suitable algorithm that works well on CPUs but not GPUs or any conceivable ASIC. That may or may not exist.
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- gedrap 13y agoWhat I don't get is what's with those hundreds of alt coins. Sometimes I get a feeling that people who missed the BTC growth are just trying to make up for it by creating their own coin. I understand that people are passionate about it and all, but it makes much more sense to have a few coins with plenty of people working on it rather than a new coin popping up every week, and being forgotten a few weeks later. It's like everyone would fork Linux kernel, make some adjustment and try to promote it as something new rather than doing a pull request. Or, like everyone was writing their own blogging engines after WP's success.
- _pmf_ 13y ago> Sometimes I get a feeling that people who missed the BTC growth are just trying to make up for it by creating their own coin. Which is true in 95% of cases.
- eloisius 13y agoCompetition between crypto currencies isn't undesirable to early BTC adopters. You may be right that some people who missed the train just want to make one of their own in order to get rich in the ramp-up phase. It's confusing now, but I think eventually having hundreds or even thousands of crypto currencies will contribute to their stability. Hopefully, we'll eventually have an abstraction layer on top of all these coins that can maintain a balanced portfolio of "value" in your wallet.
- facepalm 13y agoThere is a lot of nonsense, but there are also some fascinating ideas being tested out. For example I hope that "Proof of Stakes" instead of "Proof of Work" can succeed, because I dislike the waste of energy that comes with Bitcoin mining. Then there are differing distribution models, or the "encode a contract" approaches. Anonymity is another interesting field.
- whyenot 13y agoAs I write this,the market cap for all crytocurrencies is $7.22bn. $5.6bn of that is Bitcoin, $900m is Ripple, $340m is Litecoin, and the remaining ~$400m is the remaining 205 currencies with enough of a presence to be traded on exchanges. A lot of money, for sure, but it's really a drop in the bucket compared to Bitcoin, (Ripple), and Litecoin. If you look at daily volume, get rid of Ripple and add Dogecoin.
- dragontamer 13y agoI wonder how long it will take before people start using Proof-of-Stake coins, which don't have the ASIC mining issues at all. (Naturally, because "mining" with Proof-of-Stake is not a competition of processing power)
- gojomo 13y agoThere are still problems with proof-of-stake being more manipulable and fork-prone: the incentives to converge on a single consensus are much lower. (Search for ["proof of stake" "nothing at stake"] for some related discussion.)
- mm0 13y agohttp://lmgtfy.com/?q=altcoin+pumps http://lmgtfy.com/?q=altcoin+pumps
- facepalm 13y agoI guess that means the (tiny) amount of LTC I own has just doubled.