Topic: [ANN][DASH] Dash (dash.org) | First Self-Funding Self-Governing Crypto Currency - page 6396. (Read 9723858 times)

Who needs an asic!

"Hackers turn security camera DVRs into bitcoin miners"
http://rt.com/usa/hackers-security-dvrs-bitcoin-miners-913/

Delicious algo. Getting 953 khash on 1gb 7850.

I was trying to build off the idea that in choosing a master node (or attributing another part of DarkSend) based on data yield from the previous block found (this is how DarkSend works from my understanding, but someone please tell me if I'm wrong) .. it seems that the basis of allowing anonymity is permanently tied to (becomes some function of) the hash function itself. Personally I see it as something that can be independent of the hash function, but these are just hopes and dreams from what I can tell is available right now .. with alternatives like regular CoinJoin or 3rd party mixing (Still have a lot of reading to do, but I think there's enough here to make my point). I could be totally wrong though, and this might be the best way to go about this.

As far as what follows from the concessions .. that depends a lot on the decisions that are made and how Litecoin turns out in the next few months. I could easily see faults you mention with ignoring a changing landscape and not adapting . . and I'm sure they do too otherwise they would be laughing at x11 . . but even if it is flawed it's still wide open to a bigger vector. The same one that's in bitcoin as well . . if the price went up 100x in the next few months . . yet it's still flawed, outdated, and offers nothing new besides the Scrypt PoW . . people will still hold on to it and continue because it has an established value. I see it as a form of bribery. Not that it's a terrible thing, just that that's what it seems like to me. "Hold onto your coins because we say they're worth xxx dollars," seems like a strange way to keep value to me is all. Also, if Sha256 itself is ruined somehow, at least there would be a chance for Scrypt to survive.

Apart from that, the other clear result so far is new hashing functions. We now have Scrypt-Jane, n-Scrypt, X11 and other numerous chained algorithms all available to serve as a suitable PoW for the infrastructure that goes into these coins. Each one a definite leap toward moving away from pennies, dimes, nickels and quarters.

More toward your point about changing algorithms though . . this introduces some tough back-end issues for me. Let's say that Vertcoin decided to switch to x11 from n-scrypt tomorrow. In this situation, you are moving from a capability for one person to mine 5-6 times as much as before, and instead mine with a cloud of computers instead of just a graphics card. In this case, the first people that flocked to your coin will immediately feel cheated just because the difficulty would go from 200 to about 1200 overnight. Every hope, assumption or definition of "what would an 800 difficulty be like" would be immediately be gone. You're effectively changing the entire coin to a different one . . while calling it the same one.

All this amidst others who have decided that doing something like that generally requires making an "alt" coin to begin with . . well I would imagine panic and bedlam if we're talking about 50 million dollars in market cap. I've taken the example to an extreme here . . but I guess what I'm getting at is that these algorithms are all open-source. Respecting the entire concept of that, to me, involves never taking someone else's algorithm (and usually coin concept) after I've already settled on my own. I guess I could settle on a middle ground here and say that as long as it's not an open-source ripoff,and instead an original improvement I can deal with algorithm changes.

Did Evan ever update DGW2 in the beta wallet?  I just downloaded it again, but still can't sync.  Maybe it hasn't happened yet??

The title of the thread gave it away a little with the capital letters only for the word "BULLSHIT".  

I guess it really is that simple. From Lite to Dark.

Changing your algos around is stupid. It's not arrogance to refuse to change it. It's common sense. May as well keep changing your market cap every day. Or suddenly switch from PoW to PoS with no notice... Such drastic changes undermine the coin, especially a widely accepted coin.

There comes a point where you have to accept that the specs are carved in stone and futzing with it will only make it untrustable. Everything will be ASICed eventually. The people making their demands need to pull their heads out of their asses. They're just mad bro, they lost their money hose... Same old shit story.

Maybe he's egotistical and corrupted beyond belief. Is that not undermining trust badly enough already? Start juggling your algos and you may as well stick a fork in it.

But whatever. I'd be plenty happy to see them bail and shift to DRK. Even if it happens as a result of tug-of-war on the money hose. I'm pretty sure Evan isn't a punk that would go dicking around with it just because some whiny miners that couldn't afford the next step got mad bro.

Of course. Because 1. they (ltc and CL) feel threatened from DRK's brilliance and 2. Getting lots of ASIC companies bribes/ donations/ under the counter hand outs (call it what you will its a bribe), is a good motivation to argue against an algorithm change. So rather than change algo, you therefore attack desired algo (X11), which most of the litecoin ppl were advocating for, with a mountain of FUD and nonproven conspiratory bullshit.

If those litecoin people (I have seen numerous threads requesting this) want to change their algorithm to X11 and their dev (CL) is too egotistical and corrupted beyond belief to change it well. I have a solution for you all. SELL LITECOIN, BUY DARKCOIN!

I was unaware of that. I'll fix it, thanks.

Hardly a discussion. Just an anti Darkcoin thread in disguise. So that means we have 4 FUD agents/trolls confirmed till date. More exposure is always good although you'd hope positives outshine the negatives. That troll is nothing compared to trolls in the BTC wall thread, they will make you shiver if you have heavy fiat on the line. I believe he has had altercations on this thread or other places wrt darkcoin. You will not be able to reason with these types.

Apparently there are phantom miners out in the wild that are faster than publicly available miners. D'oh like that isn't the case with any other algo. And this is why x11 is bad haha

Not to pick nits, but how long ago was the name changed from XCoin to DarkCoin? The tray icon is still XCoin... How long would it take to clear that bit of low-hanging fruit? Just built the latest and that still give me a sad.

This seems very promising. where do I try out 0.9 based version?

Why is DarkCoin keep on changing versions... now version 10... when they are still on 0.8.6 code base.

This way, BitCoin should be on version 86.

While I agree with many of your points I'm not sure if I understand what you want to say in conclusion.
That one concession leads to another is correct. But what will follow from that? Ignoring changing environments and stay at your roots till new currencies are multiple years ahead on a technical basis (and therefore also in security)?
In my opinion a coin that claims to be good enough for a substantial market capitalization (I mean here real living economy and not pump&dump) needs to take care of all technical developments and change its code basis significantly from time to time. There's no way around.

That said, a coin developer needs to decide whether he wants to create a coin for mass adoption and daily use, then he will be conservative and very careful in changing substantial parts of the code.
If you want to create a coin just for exploring a specific aspect without the desire of being the next Dollar, then much faster transformations are totally legit. Not every coin is made to be investor friendly or easy to use for non technical persons.

What I want to say is: each coin must decide what it wants to be.

This is a really difficult discussion as so many different aspect and arguments are coming in - hope I don't got lost in it  

I agree with this entire assessment. If it's math, a chip can be made to do it really fast. ASIC resistant is as good as you can get, and even then, ASICs are still inevitable. It's not a bad thing and I'm tired of the half-baked arguments against ASICs. I heard the same arguments back in the early days of BTC when people figured out they could use GPUs... "But I can't afford GPU, consolidating, hash power attack!" It's just the grumpy people who couldn't afford a GPU getting mad and trying to persuade devs to give them back their money hose...

SuccessCoin ignores this kind of bullshit.

DRK's difficulty rate increase is the thing that makes it most resistant, not the math itself. Math can be chipped no matter what.

If a coin makes it to ASIC stage, that just means it's been widely adopted enough to be worth it... It's a good thing.

Are you referring to any forked failcoin, or DRK specifically?

On 1. I can concede a bit from the previous stance that ASICs completely destroy decentralization in the sense it can provably allow large-scale growth after a sufficient amount of time has been spent without them growing the base network, and only a certain amount of decentralization is lost, and ASICs are not much more "profitable" except for energy savings in the sense that using two of them will give you 1000x more money than using two computers (or previous generation of network supporters), and the cost of purchasing them isn't an ungodly amount so that I might consider an investment. To this effect, the power won't be out of my hands for long . . and that I might be okay with. I feel like if nothing else this should be a balance where if the scales were originally tipped in my direction, they should be tipped in the other so long as they can once again be tipped in my favor.

On 2. I could never see no problems in a hard fork. There are always major problems in forking a coin. Again, my main example is Litecoin. The original spirit of the coin was that it was ASIC proof. After the stance switched to ASIC resistant . . people saw this as an open door to create new currencies and splinter off of the main fork. Now the stance is clearly neither of these as the ASIC machines are here . . and we're left with the core team itself addressing questions as to a hard fork amongst people making yet more of their own "asic-proof/resistant" forks. One concession leads to another which leads to another . . and this has pulled attention and value away from Litecoin and into a multitude of various Scrypt forks. My point is that the spirit of the community is not and never will be one unified spirit. Anonymity does not have to be part of your algorithm and I refuse to believe it will be. Take for example Bytecoin . . not the sha256 one but the real one based on CryptoNight.

Discussion on x11 and mining it in general started up with legitimate discussion . . anyone that has the technical basis should chime in else it looks like the thread will implode.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/these-new-efficient-x11-algos-everyone-is-talking-about-bullshit-or-real-556277

Thanks for the very interesting discussion about pro&contra of ASICs and hashing algorithm changes in general. I got some new views on this topic I want to write down for myself and you

1) ASIC backed coins are better in the longterm
Running the network of PoW algorithms always uses a huge amount of energy with no other benefit than securing a cryptocurrencies network. To reduce the worldwide "wasted" power, it is significantly important that you use the most energy efficient hardware for this purpose.
Once a coin grew big enough that it starts to become a part of the global financial market, it also becomes more important to pay attention on the networks security. Because of this importance there will always be people that mine this unprofitable coin even at a loss.

This two points bring me to the conclusion, that a highly optimized, energy efficient mining chip is the best solution when we think big. That's just were Bitcoin is now, btw.


2) Algo switches are no problem if this is the spirit of a coin
Off course, not everybody can afford a $10k+ ASIC just for beeing part of the cryptocurrency movement. They want to use their $xxx cards and want to support/research other aspects of cryptocurrencies than mining and distribution. To see how their idea evolves in the wild with a real market and egoistic actors on it, you need a lot of time. This time is long enough to develope ASICs which make it impossible for the unwealthy people to continue their research from a financial aspect.
If there now would be a coin that has its focus on, let's say anonymity, then it becomes necessary that all interested people are able to stay an active part without disadvantages for all time being.
So if the developers propagate right from the beginning that it will switch the hasing algorithm from time to time for this purpose, there will be no problems in fork adoptions as everyone must accept this as an annoying side effect of his GPUs inefficiency.


Darkcoin is still a baby coin if you look at its age. It's born with two intesting aspects: anonymity and a new ASIC proof (for now) hashing algorithm twice energy efficient compared to scrypt. Because of the latter point I think here are many people around that could deal with hard forks as long as there will be well tested and platform independend mining software for uncomplicated switches.

I don't think what you are basing this on is even 5% correct

What, you're the guy who was scamming all of us who were mining at Lottery pool by submitting 0 diff hashes by  the butt load, taking a percentage of everyone's share, contributing nothing, and your angry because CHAOSiTEC, bless him, found out before you could withdraw?  LOL.

And you accuse CHAOSiTEC, one of the biggest Darkcoin supporters ever, of running a scam pool?

You've got some nerve buddy!