Topic: ASICS killing BTC ? - page 3. (Read 15908 times)

What do you mean? Scrypt centralizes control in hands of few GPU miners? I agree, with things like block erupter: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/announcement-block-erupter-usb-195004 bitcoin mining going to be very decentralized.

Yes wonderful script kiddies claiming to know how great ASIC's are.

yeah besides the whole SHA256 vs Scrypt thing, I agree with what you are saying

and you are correct in that Bitcoin itself isn't being killed, just everything it stands and was created for is

Nothing is original anyway, it doesn't have to be completely unique, just be different enough to provide incentives for its use

::sigh:: perhaps. Although, Litecoin - as the king of the copycoins - is still merely a pimple on Bitcoin's ass. If it can be lanced before attaining any meaningful ratio, then the promise of CryptoCurrencies still has a chance. If not, I believe we're stuck with central banks for another century or three.


I say toe-may-toe, you say tuh-mah-tuh. You say improvements, I say gratuitous and ultimately insignificant changes.


I don't believe anything is yet killing bitcoin. If there are any threats about which to worry, the arrival of ASICs ain't among them.

Yeah, that's reality. If bitcoin dies, litecoin will inevitably die as well. Because it is not unique, there are tons of scamcoins like litecoin (in fact they are all, including litecoin, copypaste of bitcoin).

Bitcoin is was trivially inflated into nothingness

why would the masses put money into it?

You want to apply it to a world where there is only Bitcoin? So you're referring to a fantasy world?

They aren't copycoins because that would imply they did not make improvements.

ASICs themselves aren't killing bitcoin: unwelcome, unabashed, and undeserved greed is. ASICs are merely the axe being swung by the executioner

Hi Hate. I did re-read the last sentence. And I tried to apply it to a world where there was only Bitcoin, and no (meaningful) copycoins.

I could not see any conflict.

Please enlighten me.

Re-read your last sentence

now apply that to Bitcoin

now let's pause for a moment for station identification

"This message brought to you by: Reality , she's quite a bitch sometimes but at the end of the day you can either live with her or die trying to kick her out"

When on a single die, with no complex logic, memory is pretty darned cheap.

Try to combine it on a single die with more complex logic (e.g. hashing engines), and you've shot up one or two orders of magnitude in cost.

Semi processes that lend themselves to endless repetitions of tiny circuits (DRAM) do not lend themselves to orders of magnitude of vastly more complex circuits (logic).

Please don't take this as an endorsement of Litecoin. I hope it dies a speedy death. I think the prime reason people desire CCs is the so-called inflation-proof aspect. If a second coin such as Litecoin catches on too quick, it opens the floodgates to endless inflation - not per-coin, but of so many copyscamcoins. Thereby leaving the masses saying (correctly) 'why would I put my money in something that is trivially inflated into nothingness?'

A lot of people on here just don't seem to get it.

There is no difference between using Altcoins to purchase goods and using Bitcoins, except the amount and variety of goods that can be purchased at the moment and that (according to bitheads) minor caveat of confirmation time.

One of those differences is going to change with time, the other will always be set in stone.

We live in the age of convenience, and waiting 60+ minutes just to buy one thing online is anything but convenient

Just another scammer inflating their post count to circumvent the PM sending limits.

/holds up Radeon

From my cold, dead hands...

Sarcasm or stupid?  I just don't know.

(most serious miners have run rigs headless for a long time sempron processor, linux on usb stick, no mouse, no keyboard, no monitor, a power cable and ethernet).

If you can modify a simple desktop computer you can make it a more energy efficient bitcoin miner. Start with removing your mouse. ASICS are just for showing off.

All this dramatic, existential angst over temporary growing pains...

For those confused on why asics are hurting us more than helping us here is a short explanation of when asics would help:

The % of ppl using asics vs the rest buying bitcoins for spec/holding/trading/buying goods is too high. When that % is low OR when the price of asics falls to a rate at which it stops those hoarding or is a very small amount of bitcoins to recover intial investment is where you will see asics actually help the community. Until then it is destorying it. You can't get any more simple than that.

I can only imagine asic producers becoming more widespread, aswell as difficulty rising thus leveling off the demand from buyers purely from trying to profit quickly rather than to hold over a long period of time allowing for more stable growth in our eyes. Thus I would assume to see some very cheap asics hiting the market sometime in a year or so, coupled with high difficulty and low btc rates should provide breeding grounds for the next base in the chart.

Well no.  There is no bank where 8 figures is a "rounding error" and most nations could not afford that type of expenditure.  Still Bitcoin is hardly worth spending 8 figures to kill it today however someday Bitcoins might have 100x the economic activity and then spending 10 figures is beyond a rounding error for just about everyone on the planet.

The cost in killing Bitcoin is that the second you do someone will release a newer coin that is immune (or at least very resistant) to the method you used to kill it.  Think POW/POS hybrid or something we haven't even thought of yet.  Necessity is the mother of all invention.  Much like killing Napster didn't kill file sharing.  So what is next spend another 8-12 figures killing the half dozen next gen hybrids spawned from the carcass of Bitcoin?  Then what spend another 8-12 figures killing their hybrids.  It is merely forced evolution.   

ASICs does three things:
a) prevents attackers from "cheating".  Pretend ASICs don't exist and the attacker uses a technology over a magnitude more efficient.  Bitcoin GPU miners march into battle with flintlock rifles and get nuked from orbit by a star destroyer. 

b) finally eliminates the risk of botnets.  Some people think GPU have done that but the on core GPU (APU) have significantly improved and now Intel and AMD both include OpenCL drivers in their default installs.  It is only a matter of time before botnets start adapting to use GPU power.  Now the on-core GPU may seem but they are capable of 50 to 100 MH/s.  A botnet with  ten thousand such nodes would have significant power against an "all GPU" network.

c) has the potential of creating widespread hashing power on a scale never see before.  Think $5 chip in home router (Bitcoin edition) adding 1 GH/s to the network.  Now imagine someone like dlink is making the router and sells 50 million units.

 

I am sorry if I repeat something already been said on the thread, or if I say something stupid because I am new to Bitcoin business, but I see no danger of ASICs killing Bitcoin, and I’d be happy if you please show me where exactly I am mistaken.

If I understand correctly, there are hobbyist miners and professional miners. Hobbyist miners (like myself) engage in mining out of sheer curiosity and their ultimate desire is to get some extra bitcoins to spend on a pizza. A hobbyist miner does not invest considerable money into mining nor awaits a quick ROI and considerable profit. Professional miners are those organising mining rigs and investing serious money into the process of mining. Professional miners crave for serious mining power in order to get profit.

Professional miners did not appear with ASICs. I guess they started to emerge when GPU mining replaced CPU mining. I doubt that someone would buy a couple of computers solely for mining purposes, but GPUs are much cheaper and you can stuff a whole lot of them together with the cooling making a powerful mining rig. Most of the mining power of the network since the appearance of rigs and later FPGAs began to concentrate in the hands of professionals. Did it kill bitcoin? Obviously, no. Do you really think that 1000 hobbyist miners who mine on their only GPU brought any considerable power into the network? Just 10 professional miners with a rig of 100 GPUs each can overpower those. Make 80% of the hobbyists go but the network will stay. And the number of hobbyists won’t dwindle because ASICs will only become cheaper. On the contrary — one cannot stick 10 GPUs into a cheap netbook, but can easily do the same with a pile of USB Erupters, and something like Erupter Blade does not require a computer at all!

Now there come ASICs. Does it considerably change anything about the division between hobbyist miners and professional miners? No. The former instead of wasting electricity and killing their GPU can buy themselves some USB Erupters, or several months later even a Jalapeño or analog. Environment is safer, everyone is happier. The latter exchange their GPU rigs for ASIC rigs. The early adopters have more competing power, just as you do in business. Weaker ones get out. Stronger ones find their niche with an amount of Gh/s they can afford to invest in. Nothing really changes much. Again, the environment is safer.

But mining is only one faucet of the Bitcoin network and it’s not the most import one! If everything revolved around mining, Bitcoin would never get any value. The real value goes from adopting Bitcoin in businesses. And I believe, with ASICs the network becomes more protected against attackers because it is really hard to accumulate 51% of current TH/s and PH/s that are coming. With more protection and possibly new improvements to the protocol we have more adopters, and the value of Bitcoin rises!

The only real problem are governvents prohibiting Bitcoin collectively. And no government will do that through ASICs or other hackery. It is much simpler. Declare Bitcoin illegal. Close all exchanges into local fiat — and you will constrict Bitcoin to underground barter economy only. Can this happen? Theoretically yes, but very unlikely. Even if the US or the EU expels Bitcoin into underground, we have a growing adoption in China and Latin America. And for some states Bitcoin is not a danger to their economy, but just the opposite — a way to get less dependent on the first world banking system.

The only real danger to Bitcoin is if most of the adopters will be speculators and high volatility drives real producers out of Bitcoin. But the ASIC hype actually targeted speculators and those looking for get rich quickly schemes. Now when a considerable part of them leaves due to the stall with new ASICs and drop of Bitcoin value this will only improve the new more secure Bitcoin network.

Nope.  Litecoin now has more protection then bitcoin.   Compromise two large hosts now (asic mining operation and large pool) and you have 51%+.  ASICs are good for bitcoin if they are widely distributed.  In the hands of a few they are a problem. 

They barely provide any protection. Well, they protect it from script kiddies, but even with tons of GPU's, there wasn't too much of a worry there... after all, 99% of them are looking to make money, so all theyed do is change someones payout address, which they can do whether a machine is CPU mining, GPU mining or ASIC mining.

For an attacker intent on taking down bitcoin, they provide next to no protection... First, that attacker isn't looking for profit. Second, by contemplating attacking bitcoin, they're well aware that it's going to cost 7 or 8 figures. And a 7 or 8 figure expense is a rounding error in the budget of most governments or banks, any of whom could contract the developement of their own ASIC and still take it down with relative ease.