Topic: ASIC or other fast homemade machine will kill BTC (Read 4076 times)

What is stopping someone from making an ASIC for litecoin?

Furthermore, your claims that there will just be a few big players in ASIC manufacturing are already happening with GPUs. How many GPU manufacturers are there? Two. And really only one of them is used for bitcoin mining (AMD). Does bitcoin still work? Yes.

If there is just one company making ASICs then it is centralization.  But with multiple players in the market it is not unlike the GPU market.  With CPU's AMD is the primary supplier, but there are other was such as FPGA.

If Avalon and BFL both make asics the situation is not that different.  There may be other players in the market soon as well. 

hey, it's me
i said i wont reply, but i ate my tongue. 

because i realize i made a mistake.
i post this issue and speak in a Chinese way.
that means i just lift a corner of the mask, the rest need u to think more in that way.
if u work in a Chinese company
sometimes u'll get a strange question from ur boss
but remember, no strange question from boss, never
he must wanna say something else, u need to think more for that strange question.
it's a funny game, only smarter can survive. u'll like it.

to agree with me or not is not important, the market is the final judge.
if i'm right, BTC will drop and LTC will rise
when btc drop to $10, i'll back to this post.
good luck, everyone.

I agree with OP. ASICs means centralization, which is opposite to BTC "definition".

The introduction of ASICs may cause issues with the distribution of reward blocks and control over the networks though it is unlikely.  Sure there will be winners and losers but long term it has to happen.  If ASICs are slowly added to the network until they make a majority of the network, more of the coins will go back into the economy then now.  The reason for this is that some percentage (maybe 10%-25%) of the network hashrate comes from botnets.  The owners of these botnets probably do not care much for bitcoin (though I could be wrong!) and just want the cash.  The reason is that they have not invested in the hardware or the electricity that does their mining. 

Once ASICs control the network, botnets will be out of the picture.  It is unlikley that an ASIC controller is going to get compromised, and if so not for long.   The hands getting the reward blocks will probably be friendlier to the bitcoin economy. 

gold is wonderful because it can be used for jewelry, decoration, in electronic devices and many other things. it also has a limited supply. hence why its the 'big thing' in investments
you cant do as much with rubys and sapphires as you can do with gold. so yes in ancient times pretty things meant alot more to the rich then today, multifunction of limited resource matters more these days, take gold and platinum for instance.
diamonds can be man made... need i say more
i agree home made is a nightmare. but going back to the gold analogy once gold miners dropped their pickaxes and wash bowls and started to convert cheap second hand farm machinery into makeshift mining machinery the 'game' increased. yes it was a nightmare but it kickstarted a new industry and then came the professional machines. gold miners use to buy a pickaxe for under £50 now they spend a few hundred thousand on professional machinery.
with bitcoin what you will find is that those that do not have ASICS will start diversifying their business plans. to either not mine at all and start producing products to aid others mining, and profit from product sales. offer services to change the mined coins into native currencies for the miners, or create other wonderful businesses/services. creating new industries revolving around bitcoin.

back hundreds of years ago only the kings metalsmiths were the only ones able and skilled to do anything with the gold once it was mined. now anyone can do anything with it. take samsung for instance. they invest alot of time and money into getting gold for their components. and solar panel company's are currently right now seeking out alot of silver to ensure adequate supply to make solar panels. but you would never imagine them to be gold miners or investors as that is not their niche. but they are part of the gold//silver industry.

i will say bitcoin is not a commodity. it is a asset. so using a gold analogy has its limits. as bitcoin only has one purpose a store of value. (you cannot make jewellery out of a bitcoin).

although the program to generate coins is called a miner, i have always felt that satoshi's paper was a work of art and that using gold mining analogies was a failed comparison due to its limits in comparisons. if only miners were called vectors or designers or something more related to the art, people would not be seeing bitcoin as a commodity purely on its gold references everyone uses, but as its true representation, an asset.

so lets take an asset that cannot be used for any other purpose but to view, admire and store value... ART:
paint brush companies, canvas companies, art galleries, auction houses, art schools, and many other 'rich' businesses have succeeded in increasing wealth without themselves putting paint to paper to create the asset themselves. bitcoin will be the same. it will change the game.. not kill it.

--The Miners

Let suppose a person built a super ASIC mining cluster and have more than 50% of the network hash rate. This person have 2 choices:

1- Mine, secure the network, make $50 000 per day and be a hero.

2- Corrupt some transactions, make Bitcoin insecure for a couples of days or weeks until the developers change the hashing algorithm, loose money because of the electricity and hardware cost and be an asshole.

/Mining speculation/ ?

Just reading your title,,, ASICs are far from being "HOME" made.

>50% of all BTC that will ever exist are already mined and on the market.
Even if a single person mines all the remaining coins (which is highly unlikely), it wouldn't turn Bitcoin into a pyramid scheme somehow

ASICs will kick GPUs out just the same way as GPUs kicked CPUs out, but that doesn't change the market.

It's not miners that drive the market, it's buyers and sellers, supply and demand.
The demand isn't changed in any way by miners at all, the supply more or less fixed, the number of coins mined per day/week is always the same, no matter if there's just 1 guy mining, or a million guys, no matter what hardware they use.

just your arguments don't sum up, sorry.
Either you haven't understood how the Bitcoin technology and ecosystem works, or you are susceptible to fears and believes instead of rational arguments. The fact that you mention alchemy when it comes to gold mining seems to support the latter. Alchemy is no real possibility and never was. The things in science fiction movies (and in most mainstream movies anyway) are fictitious. No one can fly with warp speed, no one can hack into a computer just by saying "beep beep" into some phone, and likewise, there is no way some guy can make a homemade or even professionally made device which magically cheats and subverts the bitcoin protocol without anyone noticing it right away.

So your fear is generally ill guided. You should not be afraid about some hypothetical weakness of the system, rather you should be aware of individual people (your business partners) attempting to scam you. Even an ASIC producer could indeed be a scammer, but such an ASIC scammer would have to take substantial risks on his side too, so it boils down to risk assessment for individual business transactions. But the fact there are scammers doesn't allow you to deduce anything about the strength or weakness of the system as such.

The mining of bitcoins and the miners are part of an economic construction, not of an idealistic system. So it doesn't matter if mining "feels good" when you tell about it to outside people. What matters is only if mining fulfils its function within the system, and if this fulfilment of function is guaranteed an perpetuated by a technological and economic mechanism.

i'm not a newbie
what in ur mind was also in my mind
if u just see the title then reply and say it's a bullshit, forget this post or read through again.

i have explain all, no more reply for this post.

All these video and guides are from 2011, and yes they should be fixed. Today they are just misleading. Mining with your computer today don't even repay the electricity you use.

I suggest you get "What is Bitcoin?" video fixed, and all the other websites that say this is done, then. 

Maybe now finally people will notice that bitcoin is not about mining. I'm tired of people that arrive on the forum hoping to become rich by mining with their computer. That is ridicolous.
This said, mining with ASIC is much easier than with a computer. You just buy a Jalapeno, few hundreds $ and done, you mine. No need to mess with drivers, clocks, cooling etcetc.

Oh and as i said, 51% attack cost like 10 millions $, now or with asic it's the same. And it's not a lot of money. Or do still someone here believe that a million $ is a lot? Lol

Your idea boils down to "someone rich can buy tons of asic" wich is nothing new. Now someone rich can buy tons of gpu

guys
i'm not talking about Avalon or bfl or any other ASIC machine

everyone in BTC area want BTC to be well known and accepted by the world.
but how?
before ASIC, we can say "everyone use same cpu or gpu and mining in a pool to get little btc and support the network working"
but now we must say "everyone is mining with a machine, well, the machine is made a guy well known in btc world, the guy made all machines and he doesn't play the game." hey, am i talking about pyramid schemes？

if ASIC kick all GPU out, the market will never be a free market, for a long time it'll be in a mass and controlled by several ASIC manufactures.

i know my idea is very hard to be accepted when btc price raising.
but if i'm right, u'll see the price drop down very soon when ASIC test report shown to public.



60G*300=18000G it's Avalon q1. and Q2 and bfl ASIC followed.
guys, do u know what's total hashrate of the whole network now?
when u say 51% not possible and need much money, use ur finger to make a calculation first.

A 51% attack is happily doable with like 10 millions $ , cpu, or gpu, or fpga, or asic, or alien technology.

And no, asic will not kill btc, lol. Stop spreading this fud, stop this idiocy.

I don't get it.

If you don't trust that guy, don't give him any of your money.
If that guy already has your money and only want's to scam you anyway, why would he even bother creating a product and not just take your money and run?
If he doesn't run and actually creates a product that could make him more money, why would he bother attacking the network?

 

at the beginning i said anyone wanna make a 50% attack will pay huge money and get nothing, that's also what u r talking about.
but manufacture of ASIC has enough source but no need to pay anything.
because all machines just in his hand before shipping
can u imagine the mint join in the market directly?
who can supervise and control the manufacture of ASIC?
NONE!

ok, maybe u can say "i trust that guy" or all miner trust this guy.
then back to my first point
BTC sys not base on the trust on any human but math and logic.
even all miners and developers trust someone is not enough.

The point is, ASICs are not a philosopher's stone to Bitcoin,
they are no secret alchemy that could change something to BTC by some math-magic.
ASICs are just better shovels, they work the same way as old shovels, they just dig deeper, bigger holes, because they're hydrauilic.

If you throw enough money on FPGAs, or GPUs and electricity, today, you can also try to attack the network (if that's your main concern),
it has always been possible with enough resources/enough money to spend, the thing is, that if you have that much resources/money, it's more profitable to be an "honest miner" than to attack the network (which doesn't make you any profit at all).

With ASICS nothing changes.