Topic: ASICMINER: Entering the Future of ASIC Mining by Inventing It - page 1330. (Read 3917029 times)

You lost me.

... what?

I'm just quoting this for posterity. Here we have Luke-Jr playing the role of Hans Buehler from the old Crypto AG drama: "Honestly, dear Iranian interrogators, our cryptograhic chips have no secret backdoor algorithms implemented!".

But in my opinion Erik Voorhees plays this role better in the Satoshi Dice thread:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1140872

I don't think economic majority is equivalent to mining majority anymore, and certainly won't be after this ASIC upgrade. Even with GPUs and FPGAs, a lot of the bigger miners have had to sell most of their profits for fiat currency. I expect the biggest influence for such a change would be MtGox: who's going to use an algorithm they don't support these days? And I think MtGox's integrity is such that they would not go along with such a change merely to satisfy greedy miners.

Edit: For an example, note that some big GPU miners have been trying to push for an algorithm change, but they're not getting anywhere because it's based only on greed.

But in these early stages of Bitcoin, economic majority = mining majority, don't you agree ? Greed is rampant in the bitcoin mining community because every miner wants to protect their investment and maximize their profits, understandably so. There are not many miners that hash for free to strengthen the Bitcoin network.

And with BFLs pre-sold ASICs + FPGA-range they have a pretty good lock on the mining majority unfortunately... a mining majority that  has been paying a lot of money to be the first to get their hands on an ASIC to profitably mine them for as long as they can....

I hope you are right !

Mining majority cannot change the algorithm, only an economic majority can. I don't think anyone would be able to get most BFL miners to switch without a good reason, anyway - it's simply too risky since "greed" won't fly with the non-BFL miners.

There are no licenses or issued secrets. Each ASIC vendor is expected to come up with their own reasonable "secret alternative algorithm" and not tell anyone else (including developers) until such an emergency occurs. When/if that happens, Bitcoin would be made to accept any of these alternatives.

Oh, the drama! The licensed mining comes up again. Except this time the licenses are issued in the secret.

Hollywood has nothing going on bitcointalk.org.

That's the first time I hear of this.... That's more dangerous in my mind than what has been said in this thread so far... Basically BFL and some big time BFL ASIC miners can protect their investment by switching over to another protocol when a competitor comes along.... If BFL ASICs represent more than 51% of the network (and from the long list of pre-orders, it sure does look like it); they can force others to switch to their other BFL protocol.... Now that is scary ! Attacking the network for commercial profits... so much for the decentralized mining theory that was the start of this conversation !

 

Edit: I hope ASICMINER has also been advised to implement this 'secret alternative' algorithm...

That is not necessarily true. ASIC vendors are advised to implement an alternative algorithm they can switch to in case of emergency like this. If the community felt it necessary to block out ASICMINER (or some other hostile ASIC hoarder), the other ASIC vendors would then publish their secret alternative algorithms, and Bitcoin could be made to support those.

Edit: There is no single "secret alternative algorithm" being issued/given to ASIC vendors. They are all expected to come up with their own and not share it outside the company except in an emergency.

Not to mention invalids the BFL ASICs as well, which means a couple $ 100.000s goes down the drain.... I don't see many people voting for an algorithm change... those days are over, there is too much money pre-invested...

I'm not suggesting it be done, just concerned about the risk that it might be considered necessary by the community (no one man can do it).

I was asked here. The same "problem" applies to BFL ASICs and any other super-high speed mining device. I assume anyone making ASICs (and I know for sure including BFL) has given thought to the problem by now, and it's not like there isn't a solution developed already.

BFL says they are selling 100% (or close to it?) of their ASICs immediately, and a bunch at the same time to prevent any one person from having a chance to abuse it. ASICMINER has announced they plan to hoard their first batch and mine with it before anyone else has ASICs, thus centrally controlling a Bitcoin-threatening amount of hashrate. See the difference? As for "BFL lobbying"... while I do stand with BFL, I also stand with ASICMINER - I want them to succeed, and am even a shareholder; but that doesn't make these risks/concerns just disappear either.

All that being said, I'd like to note the following for anyone considering changing the algorithm:

• It sounds like ASICMINER's total will be under the 50% required to do anything evil, even accounting for some variance.
• With BFL (and other vendors) shipping ASICs to consumers within 2 months, any opportunity time for abuse is very limited.
• Most 51% attacks can be dealt with after the fact; that is, the algorithm change would be more or less just as effective if it is only IF abused. So there is no need to cut it off just for holding (near) 51% short-term.
• While the "time travel" attack remains a risk that cannot easily be dealt with after the fact, the practical reality is that it takes much longer or much more percent of hashrate to pull off, which ASICMINER probably won't have (less than 2 months and not much more than 50% if that)
• Changing the algorithm breaks all old clients and miners, requiring more work for developers and forcing every miner to update.

"but since we speak about possible attacks against the bitcoin network in general you should consider such scenarios as well."

Indeed. As well as weighting the perceived integrity of friedcat, based on his dialog in this thread, versus the demonstrated quality/honesty of BFL's historical statements.

--

Luke-Jr, you really need to maintain some amount of consistency when posting in various locations lest charges of hypocrisy be levied.

An ASICMINER chip is expected to make 1GH/s so a getwork request so 1getwork/4s per chip, while a japaleno makes 3,5 GHash/s? I wonder why you come on this problem here and not in an BFL thread.

There https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1122034 you stated:


And now as BFL gets an competitor this isn't still true? Sounds like BFL lobbying.

As friedcat stated in his technical thread make an ASIC in a very advanced technology (comparable with the sparse numbers by BFL about power/Hash power) a chip could produced for $1/1Ghash after quite huge NRE cost. Under such circumstances it would be quite profitable to sell only 25% of the whole chips/ miningunits at an maximum price and let the other run for 'other' purposes.

I don't say that it is BFLs business plan, but since we speak about possible attacks against the bitcoin network in general you should consider such scenarios as well.

Why should one take actions against asics? When someone will attack the network with 51% then he will do. When he starts to mine normally why block him? Only because he possibly could harm the network? If so then it would be wiser to attack the network before someone could do something against it. So all this doesnt make sense to me.

I'm really disappointed someone as prominent as you would make these misinformed suggestions over the rise of ASIC. It's not like this hasn't been debated thoroughly over the years here.

Attempts to fiddle with the hashing algorithm to deter FPGA mining is Litecoin's strategy and mostly a temporary gesture of goodwill toward casual miners. (Of course this feel-good mining atmosphere would make a pool operator happy.) It would also ruin the credibility of Bitcoin going forward, is impractical of a change to make at this time, and there is no justification for it. Right now there exists a perfectly free market for building and competing on hashrates. There is no financial incentive for anybody (except someone with a vested interest in destroying Bitcoin) to misuse their network position.

Think emergent phenomena. You're going to have to deal with it, because there isn't even a way to change the algorithm to deter ASIC mining anyway. It will eventually exist and I hope it is developed faster to better position Bitcoin against entities who truly wish it harm.

Ok. But i think you misunderstood something. You say that the shares currently are more worth than 1/400,000. But the company started in fact with 400,000 shares. Which means only because the company didnt sell all the shares yet the remaining shares are still hold by the company itself. Which means the dividend for these unsold shares are going to the company. So there cant be a higher value for the already sold shares. Every share has the same value even when now the rest of the publically available shares would be sold. Only when the initially opened shared would be raised higher than 400,000 the sharevalue would go down. At least it would be strange if it would work other way.

I think its better to buy shortly before the asics go live. Even when the shareprice is higher then one could earn at other projects in the meanwhile. So i think i will wait a bit.

On the other hand... in reality its really hard to find a project that would be good to invest to. I realized that a real mining share will pay 1/10 less dividend each month. And the price of the share can even drop to half the value. So investing in miningprojects can lead easily to have less money at the end than before. And you still have to sell your shares to get your money back. That means pressing the price down. I think its really hard to find a project that is really worth to invest. The only one with stable shareprice and good return is a hyip most probably which means even higher risk. Its really hard to find something worth to invest.

That only solves the share/result side of the problem. You still need to getwork for every 4 GH/s.

According to the problem of centralization, we are going to make our investors break even very fast, and we also want to stay in the ASIC mining business for long. Therefore, we have the incentive of causing neither the short-term nor the long-term panic.

In addition, we believe that Bitcoin could only be destroyed from outside, that is, people or organizations taking opposed position against Bitcoin. If honest miners or mining device manufacturers will make the network un-secure, the concept of Bitcoin as a great currency won't be a sound one, and we wouldn't start Bitfountain in the first place.

Yes and no. As pointed out by friedcat, the fair hardware price (and thus the incentive to buy) is dependent on the network hashrate. A big mining operation cuts into the hardware selling price, and is thus self-defeating. However, you have a warped perception of the process. ASICminer doesn't pick spots - it just participates in the digging, with no competitive advantage (because every chip not sold is an opportunity cost).

As a matter of fact from the view of an individual miner it doesn't really matter whether the 12 TH comes from ASICminer or from it's privileged group of first customers.

At least we agree on something. More distributed mining - that's the core of the ASICminer business. Provide a huge supply of affordable chips. But I got the feeling that you don't really understand where the network is going. Once the chips are rolling out we're heading towards PetaHash. Thus, 12 TH will be a small mining operation. A single household will be able to do up to 1 TH.

If they haven't yet - the mining pools should introduce variable share difficulty. P2pool supports it. This way strong and weak miners can coexist peacefully.