Topic: Cryptonight / Cryptonote - On GPUs and ASICs and profitability (Read 1657 times)

Hi jdoi,

Are you still updating the list? For example, Electroneum has already forked (in your list it is marked with "upcoming" fork).
I think the situation has stabilized a bit, probably from now on nothing much will change anymore...

Excellent idea! I'll add the column and the details soon

I appreciate the time you put into keeping this list updated

I have an idea on how this could be improved: maybe you could add a new column to your table and also specify the algorithm used by the coins that forked.
Some have switched to cn-heavy, cn-lite, cn-v7 and this place could be a good resource for that information as well

It's just curious that just now the diff skyrocketed. Given the timeframe its more probable that ASIC's or FPGA's are now mining there. The last days you can see huge differences between the CN coins

Even though graft is forked (https://www.graft.network/2018/04/17/graft-network-node-update-1-1-2-block-64445/) and currently at height ~65k (https://blockexplorer.graft.network/), some of the pools still have ridiculous has rate (e.g. https://cryptoknight.cc/graft/). Doubt I can make anything with my few vegas.

Thanks! Updated the list.

That may not necessarily be asics, they are also facing the issue with botnets

It seems that Aeon is not ASIC resistant after all:

https://www.cryptunit.com/coin/AEON

Hashrate and diff skyrocketed as of yesterday

I see Fonero (FNO) has also forked to be more ASIC resistant, you can see more info on their GitHub page here: https://github.com/fonero-project/fonero/releases
I hope you can add this info of the OP for more people to be aware of it

Since FNO is a fork of XMR it's a good thing they also implemented the resistance, otherwise the ASICs can move over to it and ruin it.

Countdown to monero fork:
http://xmr.noctism.com/

Ref: https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/85cudl/20180318_monero_dev_meeting_summary_and_logs/

That's correct. Even if they do forks more often. Coin mining with GPU will help these coins to preserve decentralization for a long period and to avoid the errors of bitcoin. Now bitcoin mining is monopolized by several large miners, most of them in China. What will happen if China prohibits miners from working tomorrow? Blackmail the miners did not go to segwit2x and we are today experiencing because of this problem.

I admit ASICs may not be entirely an issue. They also face issues with large botnets that occupy much of the network hash (but that's a different discussion). I'm a bit open ended on the argument.

     For the first part you mentioned i.e. the 6 month fork, it does seem like trouble, but the fast change of pow was their official proposal after the fork on Mar28 - since I not completely knowledgeable about their updates I'll refrain from commenting, though their pull request has some interesting points. Bitmain is releasing in May. If this were the final version, they could just as easily updated the ASICs by delaying this time around, wouldn't that have rendered the fork useless. The problem with the ASICs is that they were too costly to update to newer version, and if they were viable in the current form, Bitmain and others would continue to sell them at very high price. Also the bitcoin Asics remain profitable even after increase in the difficulty is due to the high price of the bitcoin. And I'm not sure if many (even if the amount is in not in hundreds of thousands or millions) people decide to mine monero, the difficulty would most certainly rise, which may not necessarily give out enough ROI to justify an single ASIC, and rather insignificant profits for smaller GPU rig miners to mine at all.
      On the other hand, the adoption of ASICs for bitcoin is truly much more than anticipated though.

Ref: https://github.com/monero-project/monero/pull/3253

Forking every six months... That's downright hilarious 

Miners and regular users will have to constantly update their wallet and/or miner software. Not only will it be a pain for the average user especially if they don't understand how forks work, it creates more work for exchanges, and forums and other support vectors will suffer because of this since they will helping all these average users through all their troubles.

The claim and the reasoning behind constant forking is to avoid "ASIC centralization." This is still a concern? Bitcoin (as an example) is almost 10 years old and people are still worried about "ASIC centralization?" Really...?

I thought Monero do the hard fork every 6 months which would further make things difficult to constantly produce new ASICs

Ref:
- https://getmonero.org/2018/02/11/PoW-change-and-key-reuse.html
- On the fork that is later this month https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/82w91m/monero_network_upgrade_at_block_153950028th_of/

Why wouldn't there be? It's not about the tech. It's quite simple really ... in matters such as these there will always be a conflict of opposed ideas or attitudes or goals. A difference of opinion.

Let me also add...If/when Monero forks to a new algorithm, if it is indeed a profitable coin, ASICS will be made. This is inevitable. Then what...? Another fork?

Time to get realistic.

I'm not well conversant with Ethereum and Ethereum Classic (apart from they got hacked due to flaw and decided to hard fork, but am unsure why the old coin was required to be still in circulation), but why would you think there would be "Monero Classic". Wouldn't all demand be for Monero - and who would be responsible for Classic version, which if I'm not wrong would not be v7 or basically current version open to Asics?

Be ready for "Monero Classic" cause you know it's gonna happen.

Thanks, I've added in the twitter link that says so, if you have other sources please let me know

Although I'm not saying buy ASICs, I'd like to point out most of the coins though have decided to fork have no definite time (unlike monero) or some might have decided to wait and see. There are few, new CN coins with less market worth - so ASIC owners might suddenly target all those till they decide to fork (until all new CN coins move to updating their algorithms - auto or manual). Since all of them decide to move to smaller coins, their difficulty and profitability will drop. But the time between the ASIC owners get their machine and the fork is unknown. (For eg the Baikal miners should be seen soon, and most of the coins are (hopefully) working on their fork but not before people get their ASIC) So although it seems like initial owners might make some money, but overall I think I'd not go for CN ASIC.

According to SUMOKOIN telegram , they have decided to fork .   

Wow, so none of the CN coins have confirmed that they will stay ASIC mineable? Might be a bad time to buy an ASIC then.