Technical Cryptonight Discussion: What about low-latency RAM (RLDRAM 3, QDR-IV, or HMC) + ASICs?
The Cryptonight algorithm is described as ASIC resistant, in particular because of one feature:
A megabyte of internal memory is almost unacceptable for the modern ASICs.
EDIT: Each instance of Cryptonight requires 2MB of RAM. Therefore, any Cryptonight multi-processor is required to have 2MB per instance. Since CPUs are incredibly well loaded with RAM (ie: 32MB L3 on Threadripper, 16 L3 on Ryzen, and plenty of L2+L3 on Skylake Servers), it seems unlikely that ASICs would be able to compete well vs CPUs. In fact, a large number of people seem to be incredibly confident in Cryptonight's ASIC resistance. And indeed, anyone who knows how standard DDR4 works knows that DDR4 is unacceptable for Cryptonight. GDDR5 similarly doesn't look like a very good technology for Cryptonight, focusing on high-bandwidth instead of latency. Which suggests only an ASIC RAM would be able to handle the 2MB that Cryptonight uses. Solid argument, but it seems to be missing a critical point of analysis from my eyes. What about "exotic" RAM, like RLDRAM3 ?? Or even QDR-IV?
QDR-IV SRAM
QDR-IV SRAM is absurdly expensive. However, its a good example of "exotic RAM" that is available on the marketplace. I'm focusing on it however because QDR-IV is really simple to describe. QDR-IV costs roughly $290 for 16Mbit x 18 bits. It is true Static-RAM. 18-bits are for 8-bits per byte + 1 parity bit, because QDR-IV is usually designed for high-speed routers. QDR-IV has none of the speed or latency issues with DDR4 RAM. There are no "banks", there are no "refreshes", there are no "obliterate the data as you load into sense amplifiers". There's no "auto-charge" as you load the data from the sense-amps back into the capacitors. Anything that could have caused latency issues is gone. QDR-IV is about as fast as you can get latency-wise. Every clock cycle, you specify an address, and QDR-IV will generate a response every clock cycle. In fact, QDR means "quad data rate" as the SRAM generates 2-reads and 2-writes per clock cycle. There is a slight amount of latency: 8-clock cycles for reads (7.5nanoseconds), and 5-clock cycles for writes (4.6nanoseconds). For those keeping track at home: AMD Zen's L3 cache has a latency of 40 clocks: aka 10nanoseconds at 4GHz Basically, QDR-IV BEATS the L3 latency of modern CPUs. And we haven't even begun to talk software or ASIC optimizations yet.
CPU inefficiencies for Cryptonight
Now, if that weren't bad enough... CPUs have a few problems with the Cryptonight algorithm.
AMD Zen and Intel Skylake CPUs transfer from L3 -> L2 -> L1 cache. Each of these transfers are in 64-byte chunks. Cryptonight only uses 16 of these bytes. This means that 75% of L3 cache bandwidth is wasted on 48-bytes that would never be used per inner-loop of Cryptonight. An ASIC would transfer only 16-bytes at a time, instantly increasing the RAM's speed by 4-fold.
AES-NI instructions on Ryzen / Threadripper can only be done one-per-core. This means a 16-core Threadripper can at most perform 16 AES encryptions per clock tick. An ASIC can perform as many as you'd like, up to the speed of the RAM.
CPUs waste a ton of energy: there's L1 and L2 caches which do NOTHING in Cryptonight. There are floating-point units, memory controllers, and more. An ASIC which strips things out to only the bare necessities (basically: AES for Cryptonight core) would be way more power efficient, even at ancient 65nm or 90nm designs.
QDR-IV and RLDRAM3 still have latency involved. Assuming 8-clocks of latency, the naive access pattern would be:
Read
Stall
Stall
Stall
Stall
Stall
Stall
Stall
Stall
Write
Stall
Stall
Stall
Stall
Stall
Stall
Stall
Stall
Read #2
Stall
Stall
Stall
Stall
Stall
Stall
Stall
Stall
Write #2
Stall
Stall
Stall
Stall
Stall
Stall
Stall
Stall
This isn't very efficient: the RAM sits around waiting. Even with "latency reduced" RAM, you can see that the RAM still isn't doing very much. In fact, this is why people thought Cryptonight was safe against ASICs. But what if we instead ran four instances in parallel? That way, there is always data flowing.
Cryptonight #1 Read
Cryptonight #2 Read
Cryptonight #3 Read
Cryptonight #4 Read
Stall
Stall
Stall
Stall
Stall
Cryptonight #1 Write
Cryptonight #2 Write
Cryptonight #3 Write
Cryptonight #4 Write
Stall
Stall
Stall
Stall
Stall
Cryptonight #1 Read #2
Cryptonight #2 Read #2
Cryptonight #3 Read #2
Cryptonight #4 Read #2
Stall
Stall
Stall
Stall
Stall
Cryptonight #1 Write #2
Cryptonight #2 Write #2
Cryptonight #3 Write #2
Cryptonight #4 Write #2
Stall
Stall
Stall
Stall
Stall
Notice: we're doing 4x the Cryptonight in the same amount of time. Now imagine if the stalls were COMPLETELY gone. DDR4 CANNOT do this. And that's why most people thought ASICs were impossible for Cryptonight. Unfortunately, RLDRAM3 and QDR-IV can accomplish this kind of pipelining. In fact, that's what they were designed for.
RLDRAM3
As good as QDR-IV RAM is, its way too expensive. RLDRAM3 is almost as fast, but is way more complicated to use and describe. Due to the lower cost of RLDRAM3 however, I'd assume any ASIC for CryptoNight would use RLDRAM3 instead of the simpler QDR-IV. RLDRAM3 32Mbit x36 bits costs $180 at quantities == 1, and would support up to 64-Parallel Cryptonight instances (In contrast, a $800 AMD 1950x Threadripper supports 16 at the best). Such a design would basically operate at the maximum speed of RLDRAM3. In the case of x36-bit bus and 2133MT/s, we're talking about 2133 / (Burst Length4 x 4 read/writes x 524288 inner loop) == 254 Full Cryptonight Hashes per Second. 254 Hashes per second sounds low, and it is. But we're talking about literally a two-chip design here. 1-chip for RAM, 1-chip for the ASIC/AES stuff. Such a design would consume no more than 5 Watts. If you were to replicate the ~5W design 60-times, you'd get 15240 Hash/second at 300 Watts.
RLDRAM2
Depending on cost calculations, going cheaper and "making more" might be a better idea. RLDRAM2 is widely available at only $32 per chip at 800 MT/s. Such a design would theoretically support 800 / 4x4x524288 == 95 Cryptonight Hashes per second. The scary part: The RLDRAM2 chip there only uses 1W of power. Together, you get 5 Watts again as a reasonable power-estimate. x60 would be 5700 Hashes/second at 300 Watts. Here's Micron's whitepaper on RLDRAM2: https://www.micron.com/~/media/documents/products/technical-note/dram/tn4902.pdf . RLDRAM3 is the same but denser, faster, and more power efficient.
Hybrid Cube Memory
Hybrid Cube Memory is "stacked RAM" designed for low latency. As far as I can tell, Hybrid Cube memory allows an insane amount of parallelism and pipelining. It'd be the future of an ASIC Cryptonight design. The existence of Hybrid Cube Memory is more about "Generation 2" or later. In effect, it demonstrates that future designs can be lower-power and give higher-speed.
The overall board design would be the ASIC, which would be a simple pipelined AES ASIC that talks with RLDRAM3 ($180) or RLDRAM2 ($30). Its hard for me to estimate an ASIC's cost without the right tools or design. But a multi-project wafer like MOSIS offers "cheap" access to 14nm and 22nm nodes. Rumor is that this is roughly $100k per run for ~40 dies, suitable for research-and-development. Mass production would require further investments, but mass production at the ~65nm node is rumored to be in the single-digit $$millions or maybe even just 6-figures or so. So realistically speaking: it'd take ~$10 Million investment + a talented engineer (or team of engineers) who are familiar with RLDRAM3, PCIe 3.0, ASIC design, AES, and Cryptonight to build an ASIC.
TL;DR:
Current CPUs waste 75% of L3 bandwidth because they transfer 64-bytes per cache-line, but only use 16-bytes per inner-loop of CryptoNight.
Low-latency RAM exists for only $200 for ~128MB (aka: 64-parallel instances of 2MB Cryptonight). Such RAM has an estimated speed of 254 Hash/second (RLDRAM 3) or 95 Hash/second (Cheaper and older RLDRAM 2)
ASICs are therefore not going to be capital friendly: between the higher costs, the ASIC investment, and the literally millions of dollars needed for mass production, this would be a project that costs a lot more than a CPU per-unit per hash/sec.
HOWEVER, a Cryptonight ASIC seems possible. Furthermore, such a design would be grossly more power-efficient than any CPU. Though the capital investment is high, the rewards of mass-production and scalability are also high. Data-centers are power-limited, so any Cryptonight ASIC would be orders of magnitude lower-power than a CPU / GPU.
EDIT: Greater discussion throughout today has led me to napkin-math an FPGA + RLDRAM3 option. I estimated roughly ~$5000 (+/- 30%, its a very crude estimate) for a machine that performs ~3500 Hashes / second, on an unknown number of Watts (Maybe 75Watts?). $2000 FPGA, $2400 RLDRAM3, $600 on PCBs, misc chips, assembly, etc. etc. A more serious effort may use Hybrid Cube Memory to achieve much higher FPGA-based Hashrates. My current guess is that this is an overestimate on the cost, so -30% if you can achieve some bulk discounts + optimize the hypothetical design and manage to accomplish the design on cheaper hardware.
1- Primecoin is the First non Hash-Cash PoW Crypto-Currency.
"Primecoin is the first to show that a proof-of-work algorithm could exist to compute things other than cryptographic hash functions."
2- Naturally Scarce
Primecoin is naturally scarce (not artificially) -no hard limit and this is crucial for its long term continuity and its ability to adapt to market conditions.
According to the last estimations, the total supply is going to be ~55 Millions XPM. (peercointalk.org) You don't have to worry about inflation, neither facing blunt deflation (encountered in bitcoin/litecoin)
3- Very fast confirmations - 1min/block 4- Elastic supply
ING economist: "A bitcoin algorithm needs to be developed that smoothly matches money supply & demand"
This is hard-coded in Primecoin: difficulty going down gets corrected upwards because miners are encouraged to mine, having more reward subsidy.
When difficulty is dropping (i.e. miners leave the network), reward-revenue is recalculated upwards so that they come back in, ensuring the network security elastically vs price bumps.
5- Primecoin is sustainable
"Primecoin does not use a fixed cap money supply model like bitcoin as described in the primecoin paper, instead its mining output is associate with Moore's Law. It should have much slower drop of mining subsidy than bitcoin in the longer term (10+ years) thus much less affected than bitcoin in terms of risk of low security level. If Moore's law stops at some point then primecoin block subsidy would become relatively constant, rather than tending to zero as in the case of bitcoin (note though primecoin inflation rate is still tending to zero)."
"When the proof-of-work mint rate approaches zero, there is less and less incentive to mint proof-of-work blocks. Bitcoin is insecure."
"Primecoin has still good scarcity property similar to gold while network security is maintained without the need to raise transaction fee."
"Long-term bitcoin security relies mainly on transaction fees. Primecoin realistically would continue to have some subsidy long term, so is less reliant on transaction fees for security."
6- Primecoin is currently the “fairest” coin to mine
"The Primecoin algorithm is ASIC/FPGA hostile, and even GPU mining is not economically viable at the moment. While it is certainly possible to create specialized mining equipment, it is far more difficult and expensive to develop chips for high speed modular arithmetics. In contrast to SHA-256/Scrypt mining, those chips would also be multi-use and could be applied for other purposes after the next generation hits the market. In a sense, Primecoin is currently the “fairest” coin to mine, as it is purely CPU/GPU based. [...] Besides this, Primecoin already offers a number cloud mining providers, which inevitability will be the final stage in the specialized-mining-chip-race. For example, ASIC supplier KnCMiner recently announced not to produce mining rigs for household use anymore, as non-industrial grade power supply is not sufficient."
7- Primecoin can introduce new participants to the new digital economy
"In a Free Market, there's Free Will (and Creativity) as driver for Actions - and fundamentally Primecoin (almost philosophically) provides us with the ability/choice of applying our Ingenuity on Mining."
"With Primecoin, people who like to mine cryptocurrencies have a better choice to mine, to get more benefit out of the mining activity & environmental cost."
"Primecoin complements the goal here as it produces additional scientific value from the consumed energy. So people who like to mine cryptocurrency for whatever reason have a better choice to mine, to get more benefit out of the mining activity and environmental cost."
With Primecoin, you can actually and effectively Innovate and Improve on Mining Technologies and Techniques, on 2 lines: Hardware and Software. This is radically different from hash-cash PoW. In essence you have twice as much possibilities to earn revenues.
8- Proof-of-work cryptos will gradually transition toward energy-multiuse, ie providing both security & technological computing values. And Primecoin is the pioneer in this realm.
"One year after primecoin's public debut, the cryptocurrency designers are still focused on mixing hash functions with hash-cash proof-of-work, or finding ever more 'cpu friendly' proof-of-work; Primecoin's unique proof-of-work remains the first and one of the very few useful and actually interesting proof-of-work designs, that preserves the decentralization property of cryptocurrency."
9- Primecoin has anti-centralization features
Brute force hashing random numbers, under rigid guidelines(the more CPU, the stronger) doesn't work to mine primecoins - there's no known rules to find prime chains.
Elastic reward re-calibration, in real-time (reward gets immediately lower if difficulty would happen to rise)
10- Primecoin captures the Wasted Energy of Bitcoin's Algorithm - The mining is actually useful
"The reason why Primecoin-like “useful POWs” are the most promising is that, if the computations are useful enough, the currency’s “waste factor” can actually drop below zero, making the currency a public good."
"The innovative prime proof-of-work in Primecoin not only provides security and minting to the network, but also generates a special form of prime number chains of interest to mathematical research. Thus primecoin network is energy-multiuse, compared to bitcoin network. Primecoin is designed to sustain a prosperous mining market and high level of security, while maintaining good scarcity property like gold. Primecoin also processes payment transactions 10x faster than bitcoin network."
"Primecoin's proof-of-work is still pretty much the only alternative proof-of-work in production other than hashcash. By alternative proof-of-work, is meant alternative proof-of-work consensus. Interestingly, Primecoin also tries to address bitcoin's energy problem, from a different angle. In a free market, there is bound to be [the] coexistence of energy intensive currencies and energy efficient currencies, meaning, people have free will to consume energy to produce currency for example, mining gold. So Primecoin would demonstrate, such energy consumption can be made energy-multiuse, while preserving the critical decentralization property."
11- Primecoin has direct by-products
"Bitcoin hashing or mining provides no meaningful by-product whereas Primecoin delivers the chains of prime numbers. Primecoin is the first cryptocurrency with such property."
"Prime numbers are very useful. They are important in cryptography, and used in many encryption systems. The larger the list of known primes grows, and as the value of the numbers increases, the security of encryption methods utilizing them improves. Understanding prime numbers is also very important for high level mathematics, physics, and engineering. All non-prime numbers can be constructed from two or more prime numbers, yet a prime number itself cannot be created from any other number. Prime numbers are the building blocks of math. The more we understand about primes, we more we understand about mathematics. The more we understand about mathematics, the more we understand about the universe, and everything in it."
"For example, Primecoin provides financial incentive to these math research (e.g. research about the twin prime conjecture), if your theory advancement can provide a better mining algorithm for Primecoin mining. Twin prime is a special case of bi-twin chain. A bi-twin chain of length two, that is."
"With Primecoin, it's possible to do a proof-of-work consensus other than hashcash and have potential math research along with the fact that FPGA / ASIC development incentive may lead to problems being solved that have never happened before. It's possible, when you have ASIC primality testing chips, the computation capability in these fields would make a giant leap. That could also indirectly help theoretical research."
"Primecoin has delivered. It now holds 5 out of 21 world records in simultaneous prime numbers."
2 potential direct applications of the prime chains from Primecoin network:
Banking on Prime Numbers The prime number chains discovered by the Primecoin network may ultimately make RSA Encryption - and therefore banking in general - more secure by contributing longer prime numbers to use for RSA Encryption; the longer the prime number, the more difficult it is to "break" the encryption.
Hardware Testing & Innovation Since the early days of computing, programs for discovering prime numbers have been developed as a way to test new hardware These by-products include improved computer processors and hardware components, which can be applied to improve computer models used in the science, medical, and engineering industry.
12- Primecoin has been developed by Sunny King, one of the most talented crypto-technologists of the rank of Satoshi Nakamoto
Sunny King along with his team continues to grow Primecoin network and is currently developing a Sidechain technology for Primecoin, that is a common infrastructure to make it easier for developers to create decentralized and distributed data applications (of the sort of: namecoin, storj, peershare, datacoin )
_trendspotter at /goodcoin brought up an evaluation we can use to at least measure, rate, or review cryptocurrency based on how good they are. Here at scamcoin I think we should come up the evaluation on how BAD these guys are, just the opposite of his scale. I suggest you should use this guide also as a reference when you are looking to INVEST in a cryptocurrency. If you guys have suggestions/ideas feel free to bring it up. It is no way being objective but at least we can try. Power to the people. The problem I still trying to sort out is to weight some features properly: Anyway, the proposal Scammy Scale Rating with simple Yes or No: 1) NOT de-centralize & Not open source 2) No open-source at the release 3) "Public offering" period where one has to pay to mine early 4) No fair launch announcement, unreasonable pre-mine and/or any insta-mine 5) Extremely low starting difficulty 6) No adoption among merchants/vendors/region/country. 7) No trading at big exchanges (e.g. not on BTC-e) 8) Not offer any new feature. Clonecoins or Litecoin forking 9) Bad developer supports, lack of community or forum 10) Releasing bad software that impedes certain users from using/mining the coin. Or "faulty" start, "nodes" problem 11) Slow transaction or confirmation time 12) Short block time when mining 13) Inflated to billion of shares/coins or unreasonable supplies 14) Pseudo mumbo jumbo descriptions of the cryptocurrency 15) Poor official website, hastily done 16) No anonymity support (no Zerocoin implementation) 17) Weak security, vulnerable to 51% attack (No POS or Proof of Stake) 18) Aggressive marketing campaign, hijacking forums and threads, tons of giveaways and faucets 19) Bloat future blockchain, e.g. 2GB-60-100GB wallet you have to update even though your wallet has 2 ABC coin. 20) Weak to ASIC,GPU,FPGA miners, BotNet, or does not give everyone at least a fair chance to mine 21) Reversible transaction -- Not sure if I should leave this out 22) Low mining profitability (vs mining Bitcoin) 23) Designed to be inflationary nature 24) No interest rate of earning coin per year 25) No Multi-hashing algorithms 26) Recent release 27) Pump and dump announcements (Twitter, Facebook, subreddits or forums) associated with said cryptocurrency 28) "Rebooting" the coin, or "coin makeover" to make it fair mining/distribution again 29) Shady developers' history and/or shady major fund backers' history/intention 30) No trendsetter or no noise around the web. Use Google Trend as a way to monitor buzzes. Example:http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=quark%20coin%2C%20bitcoin&cmpt=q 31) Not much liquidity and being dependent. How dependent of that alt-coin to that of Bitcoin? Meaning, if Bitcoin goes down 20% in value, will it also dip 20% or more? 32) Unknown or less coins' volume/share percentage jumped through the roof while other known coins have modest or small gain. Example: SexCoin jumped 1200% in a single day while Bitcoin gained 3.8% 33) "Pay first, deliver product [Bitcoin 2.0] later" - essentially investors are convinced they have to pay first in USD/bitcoin because they are promised by the developers/company to have an "EARLY START" or "EARLY SHARES" or "PRE-SHARES" on the best next-generation "Bitcoin 2.0" coin that will make Bitcoin obsolete and will be the next biggest thing in the universe. Except for the part where "the biggest thing in the universe" is nowhere to be seen. 34) Interoperability 35) Purely Proof-of-Stake (POS) coins We then can further breakdown and give weigh point to each feature and start ranking them. For example: CrappyCoin : 10 yes, 15 No. A simple solution is each Yes = 1 point and each No = 0 point. However, subjectively some features should be weight more than others. I should point how to merchant adoption and trading/buy/sell at big exchanges, multi-hashing and fair mining for everyone should be scored higher. It goes hand-in-hand with its release date. Feel free to discuss.
If there was a slot machine at a casino that promised "99% payout" and when it was audited it was determined it only paid 98%, and the casino had set it like that on purpose, would you consider that a scam? If you were led to believe a new business venture you were going into with a partner had a 20% chance of you making 10x your money, and an 80% chance of losing all your money, and your business partner had a 20% chance of losing all their money and an 80% chance of making 2.5x their money, and it turned out your business partner had knowingly reversed the odds, would you consider that a scam? I believe most people would generally consider all of these scenarios a scam. If a party offering an opportunity knowingly misrepresents the risk and/or reward, they are scamming you. So.. is butterfly labs a "scam"? Even if they ship ASICs in the next few days/weeks/months? I say: Absolutely. Since last June they have been offering this value proposition to potential customers: give us your money now, and within a relatively short time you will receive a device that will pay for itself in two months and continue generating immense returns. They been aggressively pushing (banner ads everywhere, the booth at CES) their investment opportunity (nobody buys an FPGA/ASIC for any reason other than to make money), and they market it as relatively low risk with a relatively high reward. In reality though, it's been a very HIGH risk investment (due to the opportunity cost of tying up your bitcoins for approaching one year), and low reward (due to them not being first to market and the zero-sum game mining is in general). But perhaps they acted in good faith, and simply bit off more than they could chew. I would say that's not very likely. Let's compare them to Avalon. Avalon took a limited number of pre-orders, just enough to get the funding necessary to get the first batch made. He did no real advertising and worked hard to get the machines actually made and started shipping before he accepted preorders for another, slightly larger batch. BFL on the other hand has poured a ton of the money they got from taking unlimited pre-orders into advertising, so that they could get even MORE pre-orders.. estimates are that they've now literally taken tens of thousands of them... tens of millions of dollars worth! When they finally do ship, and I believe they will eventually, those who ordered will find themselves with a machine that uses more electricity than promised, mines fewer coins than promised, started mining coins later than promised, and cost orders of magnitude (due to spending bitcoins when they were ~$10 vs ~$100) more than promised. Scam!
A FPGA opensource miner has just been released running at 80Mhps but at a cost of $585. The efficiency is stated below quoted from a post in the thread.
At 80 MHps, I will need at least 3 of these to achieve a single 5830 hashrate. That is $595.-x 3 = $1785.- at full price, vs. $190.- for the 5830. Giving the 5830 is consuming $11.- a month in electricity, and assuming this board will consume zero electricity, it will take more than 145 months, or 12 years to recover the investment, always comparing to a 5830.
Apologies but no more development information will be posted. I've been offered a 25% share from someone that owns 2 FPGA clusters. If you haven't seen that type of hardware before think a 156 FPGAs per machine.
From those posts what we can understand is that the factors that affect FPGA now are high procurement cost, low running cost and ease of scalability . What this means is that with the increasing total hash rate of the network (30Ghash/day last difficultly adjustment) the question becomes when would the difficulty render GPU inefficient in contrast to running cost? Remember to take into account FPGAs are usually run in clusters and even though it would not be beneficial to buy one outright, those who have access to FPGA are the first movers and eventual dominant forces of the mining market. Of course, in the end, ASIC is where it's at. Anyone? =D Edit: read more stuff, added info.
Attention all cryptocurrency aficionados, we have a problem. Stop trading, and read this, then resume. Seriously, stop.
Go ahead, click on the handle and see that I just made it a couple of hours ago. It's ok, I don't blame you, the validity of opinions totally depend on time stamps. Like, I don't need to stay anonymous right? There is a major communications gap between the technical, developer side, and the two groups who can actually take Bitcoin to established places: the investors, and the masses. I'm from a family of investors, and I also have a thing for technical stuff, which is why I'm spelling this out down for whomever doesn't seem to see the big problem. Just like the majority of the population doesn't understand what a block or class is, I have a feeling lots of people on our side don't really understand what goes through the average person's on a daily basis. While the people leading the march towards cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin in particular, are extremely able and intelligent, they have one big flaw: they're not talented business people. These are the same people that mark most low level questions on stack exchange as "unproductive", and 'off topic', and close them, even though those questions end up being the first result of a Google search. You might think that they know better. No, they don't. As harsh as it may sound, they are the Wozniaks who don't care about profitability, and they are adamant to believe that the pure beauty of their coin's technology will save the day. The other day I was speaking with a miner, and I expressed my concerns about Ripple. He asked whether or not it was open source, I said no. He immediately said, "Well then, it won't go anywhere, it's not open source, it's shit". This is a perfect example of the lack of foresight and flexibility which is at the heart of what will be BTC's downfall. It's time to realize that Bitcoin needs a Jobs, or it'll join the likes of Netscape and AskJeeves. Bitcoin will be killed because of a lack of marketing, narrow sighted supporters, and the clout of altcoins curtailing it. Look at my concerns about Ripple, a corporation claiming to be a decentralized cryptocurrency p2p network. Ripple has recently gained popularity, partly due to nice, Apple-esque publicity stunts, lots of shills (please, blogs on Forbes, could you be more obvious), and a website I actually feel inclined to browse. Decentralized is a buzzword for ripple, and nobody reads the second line, where they mention that to them, decentralization means having bases in multiple locations. Also surprising is the fact that they have completely severed themselves from their ties to Mt.Gox. Sure, way to gain my trust. They're holding on to half of the XRP to dole out? Thank you, but I do not need welfare. Another nice example is Litecoin. Two months ago, I read about Litecoin, and the fact that the founder was brother to the CEO of BTC China. Speaking with a friend, I foresaw the rise of Ltc, and surprise surprise, the Lee brothers have played a nice game: http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?play=1&video=3000219884. A single Reddit post as to why the owner of a BTC exchange refuses to take LTC, and the price drops. Amazing what a name drop and some Reddit posts can do, no? Smart investors look for stability, and uniqueness. What will make the next big thing stand out, and will it be worth my money. Can it be easily used and understood by the masses, without making them feel dumb (iPhone vs Android, MacOS, Windows vs Linux, OpenOffice vs Microsoft Office, standard vs automatic). Sure there will be adopters of the opensource, I myself prefer standard to automatic any day, but I as a single person, don't matter, the masses, who can make 1 person a millionaire with the purchase of a .99c app, matter. If I, the investor, see a new altcoin coming out by the hour, with a supposed new unique "specialness", not only will I feel that the main contender, Bitcoin, is lacking and not a stable and secure investment, but I'll also doubt the validity of the rest of the cryptocurrency world all together. Think about it like this, to th real investors, Sumerian and C# look awfully similar, and they need the comprehensible English words to reassure me. Go to yahoo.com, what do you see? For them, mining happens underground where you send canaries. They do not understand hashes, they don't understand ASIC, SHA-266, FPGA, and you'll be lucky if they can tell you what a CPU does. Frankly, they shouldn't, it's not their job. Bitcoin's success depends on institutionalized money investing into the network, giving it validity, and making it an established form of currency. The more altcoins there are, the more institutions will shy away from investing: Why would they? They don't talk code, they talk money, and this one break in communication is enough to dump cryptocurrencies down the drain. Those comparing BTC to gold: there isn't a Gold 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, coming out every other day. Gold is valuable because it's unique. Altcoins destroy that uniqueness for BTC. No, Richard Branson saying he likes BTC is not enough, and no, a store in Timbuktu accepting BTC, while very comforting, will not take this anywhere. You need major players for the long term. I want BTC to do well and become established, not because of personal investment, but because I am truly sick and tired of the big people in governments and the F500s determining everything that has to do with our lives, be it ripping us off with trade agreements that should be constitutional referendums, tax hikes on our hard earned money, or what is good or not for me to consume and put into my body. Unfortunately, it seems like we as a society aren't ready for it yet, and seem to prefer the "pump and dump" method to altruistic sacrifices for the greater good of cryptocurrency. I don't blame anyone, we're only human, but I do hope I'm wrong. TL;DR: Bitcoin will be destroyed by altcoins due to lack of marketing to the masses (it doesn't look sexy, ok!), and the diffusion of capital. Altcoins will go nowhere because institutionalized investment and public interest will fall due to instability. This will cause the drop of value in all cryptocurrencies, and investors will lose millions. Altcoin creators: Stop diluting the market to make a name for yourselves, start working on BTC to make it a name for everyone. Altcoin buyers: 0.5 gram of gold is worth more than 1 gram of silver. Just because you don't own one entire BTC, it doesn't make you less cool.
FPGA- And ASIC-Based Mining Devices Page 1: The Basics Of Bitcoin Page 2: Confessions Of An Accidental Bitcoin Miner Page 3: The Mining Algorithm And CPU Mining Page 4: GPU-Based Mining And Mining ... I co-founded LargeCoin, Inc., and we really are developing an ASIC for Bitcoin mining. As earlier replies pointed out, the unit cost of ASICs is far lower than FPGAs once you get beyond a few hundred units. The up-front cost of ASIC production varies widely depending on the process you use. source: bitcoinwiki.org. FPGA has several advantages; such as being faster than GPU and more flexible than ASIC, meaning FPGA can be very profitable mining coins that are ASIC-resistant.Therefore ... FPGA vs ASIC Mining. By admin on April 20, 2017 in. ... FPGA stands for Field-Programmable Gate Array. In the bitcoin world, these devices were quite popular among miners once GPU mining became far too competitive. To offset the investment costs and electricity draw, a cheaper solution had to be created. ... The bitcoin mining ecosystem has undergone some massive changes over the past eight years. During the initial stage of bitcoin mining, using a computer’s processor was more than sufficient. Later on, software was developed to allow for GPU-based mining. Eventually, computers were replaced by FPGAs and the now ever-present ASIC miners. But what sets these […]
T4D #84 - Pt 2 Bitcoin Mining, BFL ASIC vs FPGA vs GPU vs CPU - Duration: 28:50. mjlorton 63,602 views. 28:50. Language: English Location: United States Restricted Mode: Off My Favorite Book - "The Bitcoin Standard": https://geni.us/NH5spNd Email - [email protected] ... Why Use FPGA for Mining? FPGA vs GPU vs ASIC Explained - Duration: 7:56. FPGA Guide 1,123 ... The Outlook on Cryptocurrency Mining - GPU vs ASIC vs FPGA - Duration: 19:57. VoskCoin 31,837 views. ... But how does bitcoin actually work? - Duration: 26:21. 3Blue1Brown 3,731,815 views. BIG Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency GPU Mining, ASIC Mining, and FPGA mining news! ... BIG Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency GPU Mining, ASIC Mining, and FPGA mining news! Subscribe to VoskCoin for more ... Is it worth it to mine Bitcoin? Aside from the altruistic act of securing the BTC network via Proof-of-Work PoW, Bitcoin mining doesn't make cents or sense n...
