Topic: "ASIC- Proof" (Read 3244 times)

That black box is not an ASIC, it's an ASIC Miner.

That means a miner filled with ASICS.

I'm going to nitpick your nitpick of my post.  Where is the error in my mention that you have to perform SHA256 in the process of calculating an scrypt hash and checking the resulting difficulty?  Yes, we're all aware that salsa20/8 will consume the most logic area and/or take the most time to perform.  That's the very point I was making, that SHA256 is dirt simple to accomplish in an ASIC, while salsa20/8 is not dirt simple to accomplish in an ASIC.  But you still have to take it all the way through (PBKDF2_SHA256 and all) if you're going to see if your hash met the difficulty criteria, so you're still going to need SHA256 implemented.

You weren't able to avoid including an SHA256 implementation in your Litecoin FPGA miner, right?  A quick look at your Github repository shows that a Verilog implementation of SHA256 is indeed present in your source.  

I would like to refer you to this post: https://forum.litecoin.net/index.php/topic,2702.msg30526.html#msg30526

Please study this specific post as it contains a lot of relevant information on the topic.

Just nitpicking (and I know you're far more experienced in logic design than I am), but SHA256 is almost irrelevant for scrypt, The real issue is the salsa-mix, which is designed to be memory-intensive and highly resistant to pipelining. The PBKDF2_SHA256 operations are just a wrapper around the meat of the algorithm.

I'm having this problem:



I just want to point out that there is no such thing as an "ASIC Proof" algorithm.

I also want to point out that there's no such thing as an "ASIC-Resistant" algorithm.

While I'm at it I'm going to go ahead and point out that THIS:



Is NOT an asic.

Now for those of you that are crapping yourselves right now and about to flip out and call me crazy, I'll clarify.

That black box is a special purpose computing device, that uses 1 or more ASICs to achieve it's goal.

These:


are ASICs.

Now anybody that wants to argue that there can be an ASIC-Proof algorithm that a general purpose processor such as an i7 can compute just needs to put on an idiot hat and go sit in the corner.  Yes, I know that's rude as hell but, c'mon.

ASIC Resistance is a real condition, but it has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO with the encryption algorithm in use.

It's simply an economic situation, and it's fluid.

Litecoin (and other coins) are not ASIC-Resistant in any inherent fashion, and they're certainly not using "ASIC-Resistant Alogrithms".  They're just not currently worth the bother.

If you are backing a coin because you think it is "ASIC Resistant" you're going to learn that this is a self-defeating goal when that coin actually achieves any significant real world use.

I just wanted to make a separate thread for this because there are SO MANY THREADS that I want to post it in. I hope that someone out there feels helped by this explanation.

Whew, all right fit over - Carry on.

Partially correct on the first point above, and very wrong on the last point.  I'm not sure how you got from "scrypt will require more complicated off-chip support components" to "an scrypt ASIC would could end up being cheaper" than an SHA256 ASIC.  The die area needed to implement an scrypt core (that actually performs with any sort of noteworthy hash rate) is massively larger than for a simple pipelined SHA256(SHA256()) core, regardless of whether there is off-die memory.  And interfacing to external high-speed I/O is one of the hardest things you can deal with in an ASIC design, especially if we're talking about interfacing to something like a very wide bank of GDDR5 at anything close to the clock rates that the Radeon GPU's operate at.  It is, perhaps, very foolish to suggest that addressing an extremely difficult external I/O problem will drive down the cost of developing and fabricating an ASIC, compared with a simple SHA256 core that barely needs to talk to anything (and when it does, can do so over even a dirt simple open-collector bus that just communicates a winning nonce when one is found).

When it comes to development cost, there's also a massive spread.  You can go and pick yourself up an SHA256 core design, for free, that performs fairly well and is fully pipelined, from multiple sources.  For scrypt, you have to go it alone and develop it from scratch, and you end up with an almost infinitely more complex netlist than an SHA256 core (in fact, an scrypt core will tend to contain two SHA256 cores) that is significantly harder to place and route on the die, and much harder to verify gate-level simulations prior to taping out the masks.  The challenge in making an SHA256 ASIC pretty much amounts to placing and routing a fairly simple netlist against the foundry's provided logic cell library, and then just copy'n'pasting the core all over the available die area.  The challenge with scrypt is monumental in comparison.

Completely untrue at current profitability rates.  At current rates, mining LTC, a GPU will pay for itself in about 6.5 months.

Since people aren't exactly rushing out to buy GPU's at the moment and ASICS is a remote risk, we can expect the LTC network to stay at about the same hash rate / difficulty for an extended period of time more than sufficient to recoup any initial investment.

And GPU mining profit is WAY above the power cost.  Just run a calculator:

https://give-me-ltc.com/calc

Just absurd to suggest that, at current levels, LTC mining won't pay for the power.  Prove your claim.  And if true, why is 20 gh/s being thrown at LTC and clones ?

As for ASICS, good luck with your BFL pre-order #2,124,123.  Have fun mining with that once it arrives in 2040.  And for FPGA BTC mining good luck competing against the ASICS that have shipped and the hordes of them being run by the manufacturers for easy mining profit

That was my point.

(though they may not do any better.)

Came across this today:

Will you produce a multicurrency device for example Litecoin?
  
Right now we are busy developing the ASIC Bitcoin miners but we have noticed the interest and we are planning to release a multicurrency device later this year.

WindMaster must've got bored. It's a shame, he was educational.

Anyways, these could mean "later this year" in the BFL sense, and still I think that's not going to take "decades to come".

Even I thought it would take a stable valuation of at least $10/coin to push it. We'll see where Litecoin goes between now and then.

... people with a sophisticated understanding of ASIC design and sCrypt internals determined it is not economically viable, and likely won't be for decades to come...