Topic: ASICMINER: Entering the Future of ASIC Mining by Inventing It - page 1294. (Read 3917058 times)

It's funny how people on one side or another of an argument can be so completely blind to the opposing premise.


I wince when I hear statements like, 'the only logical answer ...,' without any substantive rebuttal of specific argument.

Yes, I am aware. Many ifs in there.

BTCest of luck. :3

Yet in their business plan they state:

Well, asicminer is not taking preorders, because it wants to be a mining company, not a mining gear supplier. So it's split itself up into shares representing the equity. Except it's not listed anywhere, nobody can buy or sell it.

I can see why the community'd start forgetting about them at this point, as what exact sense does it make to have them figure in places like the wiki? What potential buyers? There's no way to buy anything from them even if you wanted to. They aren't selling rigs, their shares can't be sold, what buyers? Buying what?


Which ties into the point above. Gmaxwell is an ass, sure, but I don't see much merit in Diablo's theory that Lukedash is "a BFL shill".


From what I understand, mining in a pool is different from mining solo in that the pool operator, and not the pool miner, controls the mining. So mining in a pool would be akin to going "here, community, is some hashing power, use it as you think fit," whereas mining solo would be "we reserve the right to attack the network any way we see fit, deliberately or accidentally".

The merit of going with some pools is that their ops have so far shown themselves credible. For an example: hashpower is 12TH today, slush gets 6TH, Luke gets 4TH Graet gets 2TH (I left some pools out please don't get insulted, it's just a simple example!). Tomorrow, this company adds 24TH to that pool, of which 12 to slush, 8 to Luke, 4 to Graet. It's true that all the pools grew by 200%, but because ALL grew by 200% their relative proportions are still the same, 50%, 33%, 17%.

So maybe in the end the best strategy would be to do a neutral split, mine proportionally in all the pools, equal to their current market share. Speaking of PR moves, THIS would have been the smart PR move to make. Unfortunately the aspiring mining company not only lacks the strategic competence to list itself on the right exchange, it also lacks the strategic competence to properly handle its market communications. Obviously all these are remediable flaws, provided they have more sense than BFL and start working on remedial rather than waste effort in denial.

Thanks for keeping us up to date

Good luck !!!

It could also be used to prevent transactions, rendering the network useless.

I think it's mostly the reduced trust in PoW that's what makes devs and investors wary, not the possibility of an attack itself.


+1

I don't get why everyones getting so hyped up about a 51% attack.

All the 51% attack does is allow extremely limited double spending attacks (and only double spending from the point of view of non-bitcoin transactions, ie, a currency exchange or a physical inventory-based vendor). The attacker cannot forge fake transactions.

51% doesn't mean what most people think it means. If the network rate is 25TH, then the attacker must have OVER 25TH to perform the attack. With the current batch of chips that friedcat ordered, he won't have enough to even come close.

What we really need to be worried about, as a community, is why the other ASIC vendors allowed ASICMINER to become >51%. If BFL and Avalon and bASIC all ship what they said they'd ship, ASICMINER would be less than a quarter of the new network.

Update

This is a quick update. Please expect more details soon.

1. Our wafers are already in the slicing and packaging service. Whether we could beat everyone else in early delivering, or we have to revise and redo the wafers, will be known within the next two weeks.

2. All shareholders who have ambiguous Bitcoin addresses will receive the confirmation mails within this week.

3. We will make ASICMINER re-hosted after the confirmations, as well as the platform decided. It will not be later
than our first deploying and the first payment to shareholders.

Exactly. That's why you need to both physically and socially split the mining power. I was originally talking about making and selling mining farms, I don't know how pools are relevant.

I mentioned PR because even though you may split the hardware into different & disconnected locations and let them be run by different people, there is still some concern as long as it's under the same corporate roof. However, it still mitigates most probable attacks, and is therefore more defensible from a PR standpoint. I myself would like them to be run by different interest groups entirely.

I disagree; it isn't clear at all. A quick read through the OP and it looks like they are selling shares for a self-mining company.


Potential buyers for what? What/Where's the product? Where's the website advertising the product?


It is true that they aren't shipping, but BFL and Avalon both have websites that make what they intend to sell very clear. Some will have pre-ordered, while others are waiting for stock to become available so they can buy it. People know about the product and they want the product.

ASICMINER has a thread about selling shares. Any information about a potential of selling a product is buried.


This. If ASICMINER is serious about selling a product, they need to look serious. You can't "maybe" sell a product, it has to be a clear and direct goal of the company.

I hope ASICMINER considers this to be constructive criticism; ASIC vendor competition is important.

The moral of the 51% tale is that bitcoin, as the first cryptocurrency, is fragile as long as it's young and the hashing is not technology bound. Decentralization can only be guaranteed if there are no technology leaps - and these ASICs are likely to be the second to last leap to occur. The next one will be, when a company has enough money to develop a chip which is state of the art (and I don't think BFL has that quite yet).

If you want to protect bitcoin from 51% attacks during these times, first thing to do is to (re-)introduce checkpointing again - at least temporarily.

Why not just use a decentralized Pool like P2Pool?
That should at least provide some transparency.

Thing is, splitting it between pools still requires exactly same solo-mining.  In both cases you have to trust friedcat not to 51% attack - as there's no way to FORCE him to split it between pools.  So as there's no way to secretly double-spend, splitting between pools achieves absolutely zero in practical terms - and so shouldn't give any PR benefit.  Maybe in practice it WOULD give PR benefit - but I don't believe we should be pandering to the ignorant who don't understand simple logic just so they feel happier that somehow some need for trust has been removed (when it hasn't).

No matter what we discuss or what friedcat agrees to do, we (and everyone else) still has to trust that if the chips arrive, work and could generate 51% of network power he won't abuse it.  And IF it all works like that then he'd be cutting off his nose to spite his face by 51% attacking anyway - as if you can mine the majority of newly minted BTC last thing you'd want to do is massively devalue BTC (beyond the devaluation likely to occur anyway when ASICs come out) and risk some major change in hashing algorithm to shut your chips totally out of BTC in the future.

Plus honestly not sure why people think ASICs will work well on pools alongside GPUs/FPGAs - won't they need an entirely different granularity of work to avoid being totally inefficent?  Are people who propose splitting across multiple pools suggestng the ASICs sit idle whilst pools get adjusted to work with them?  If not (and they accept solo mining before moving to updated pools) then why the need to move if he didn't 51% before moving (and let's face it - best way to 51% attack anyway would be to do it before even announcing the ASICs were ready, which no plans/announcements/commitments to pool mine can prevent).

It's meaningless PR - far better to explain WHY it's entireless pointless than play out some pretence at the cost of efficiency.

Besides the irrational fear, there is a very legitimate aspect of the concern, regardless of whether it is even plausible to think that ASICMINER is a threat. Your PR move has zero value for people who matter, especially the ones who have the responsibility to develop the system itself. It's very un-Bitcoin to have to trust any particular party, and it really doesn't matter whether it is benign. The only way to address this concern is to split hashing power into different stations and introduce some degree of social insulation between them. This may very well be easily doable. Maybe not though. You may still view it as a PR move, but I think it is much more defensible.

Of course for all we know, all chips are toast and we are arguing over nothing.

There already are users that demand that once asics are out the hashing algo should be changed to prevent that these asics are used for attacking the network. So yes, there will be people screaming about the power asicminer gets.

Even when the hashing is split through some pools, the hashingpower in asicminers hands remains the same and could be used for an attack anytime too when stopping to hash into the pools. But the noobs wouldnt cry so hard at least.
Hashing into pools would have another advantage. Asicminer could put at least enough power into each pool so that it is at the top of hashers. That means a username representing a website to buy the asics of asicminer will be a nice, big commercial campaign for cost: zero. And on top... its exactly targetted at the persons that would buy the asics. Miners at the pools. (I once suggested that to friedcat but he didnt want to give me some shares for the idea. ) Anyway... i think its a good idea. The website could show the date when users can buy the asics, maybe even with prebuy. So asicminer could earn some money.

I think it would be good to let asicminer mine solo under 51% and be the top miners in pools to run a zero cost ad campaign. I think that will have the best outcome with the least fear of noobs.

Regarding a price on a new exchange platform. There is no price to be set by friedcat. Only shareholders would be put into exchange with their shares and these shareholders can, only if they want say they will sell for a price of "whatever". The same goes for buyers. They say how much they want. So there is nothing needed like a startingprice. That will be completely build on its own.


Diablo... so Luke-Jr killed Asiminer out of the wiki and gmaxwell is closing the thread and moving it to offtopic? Asicminer is clearly one distributor of Asic-Hardware. If Luke-JR and gmaxwell work against Asicminer that looks fishy. I dont see why they act this way. They drive away potential buyers from Asicminer. Im not sure what to think about this. Especially because all the other companies arent selling anything yet too.
I see asicminer is mentioned in the article at least.

On the other hand i think Asicminer should start to think about how to sell the Asics. There needs to be a website at one time at least. Now the demand should be created. Its not good to let this part of the business lay down until short before selling i think. Others could take away the needed domainnames and so on. Plus you lose time of cheap advertising because potential customers cant find any infos.

Of course mining is way more important. And i hope it will be done as far as it goes because why should asicminer give away the cashcow for cheap.

bla bla bla.....

is there any relevant information about asicminer lately....  last i heard there would be information in a week.. it has been a week.

Reading your eloquent responses above, I am starting to feel you may be right in some way. Regardless, I would prefer a  continuing influx of "random idiots" (as you call them), and less yelling and more constructive discussions amongst us who are already here, welcoming them.

FUCK YEAH!

Wait, wait. This will reduce the influx of random idiots finding their way to Bitcoin?

DO IT! DO IT NOW! DO IT WITH FIRE!