Topic: Ethereum Anti-ASIC fork, is it the right time for bitcoin too? - page 3. (Read 2478 times)

And my technical logic says: it is not the case, imho.  

First of all 'historical evidence' shows otherwise: Ethash was fully implemented in 2015 and used to mine billions of dollars worth of crypto in 2016-2018 and ASICs never managed to take over Eth mining scene in spite of high incentives and Bitmain's almost unlimited resources. All they could manage to gain was less than 2x advantage against rigs built of mid-range commodity gpus.

Most importantly, ASIC design is no magic, you need to break down an algorithm to giant instructions and implement them on die besides conventional pipelining and Single Instruction Multiple Data techniques to accelerate parallelization. When an algorithm happens to be truly memory hard, no matter how smart you are, you never manage to break it down to large enough macro instructions because they need to halt and fetch memory for continuation. I've discussed this issues above-thread in more details.

This is what Bitmain wants us to believe and unfortunately is adopted by many community members but it doesn't change anything about its fallacy.

Firstly, by ASIC proof we mean an algorithm being ASIC resistant enough to de-incentivize special hardware designers and keep them out of the mining business. This is it! We are not discussing in a pure scientific context, it is game theory and costs against incentives.

Secondly:
Every cpu/gpu on the market could easily be called an ASIC! GPUs are ASICs, definitively! They use a lot of specialized circuits for many jobs , so what the heck?

What makes an ASIC miner bad is its status as a specialized device made by a company that is targeting mining industry and nothing else. To understand why it is bad you need to read following paragraphs very carefully.

For a company to be a legitimate player in a market, besides anything else, it needs to offer a 'utility' to the value chain which it is present in, eventually. Innovations should help people (other entities present in the chain) to do their job more efficiently in the first place. Innovation is not about competition between consumers it is about competition between producers.

When Intel produces a chip with higher MIPs and more reasonable prices while competing with AMD, it is offering a utility to its customers, this is how  and why competition is justified as a good thing for consumers and the society as a whole. It is how capitalism is justified and is tolerable in spite of lot of problems and paradoxes.

Bitcoin mining but is an exceptional industry. There is no need for efficiency, actually bitcoin mining is designed to be inefficient. When companies offer more efficient miners they are not doing anything good to the industry or human being or the planet. Miners don't find themselves happier when new ASICs are announced, on the contrary a new ASIC is always bad news for professional miners because they need to pay a lot of money to the manufacturer without any improvement in their incomes, even worse with a long period of pain and stress because of the consequent rapid difficulty growth before they could manage to liquidate their assets, take loans, ... to pay manufacturer for new generation of miners.

ASIC manufacturing for bitcoin is a vanity fair, a black hole that sucks coins from miners and does nothing good for them, a serious centralization threat because of its privileged access to large hash powers.
Bitcoin should get rid of this situation, it leads us to nowhere, sticking with crackers and people who do nothing useful and still suck last coins from miners.  

It didn't even have to be a "great" business model, it just had to be better than all the sketchy hardware vendors out there who defrauded their customers.  Companies like BFL and GAW set the bar pretty low, in fairness.  If Bitmain have a dominant position in the market, it's because the position wasn't really contested back in the day.  Things are improving now, though.  

The importance of strong competition can't be underestimated.  We could use sport as an analogy.  I got a silver medal in a Judo tournament once.  That's not a brag, since there were a total of two people in that particular weight division   .  Suffice to say, I wasn't very good at Judo, so it wasn't difficult for the other guy to take 1st place.  But if there had been a greater number of skilled competitors, it might not have been as easy for them to win.  And obviously, I didn't earn that second place.  Someone more deserving would have taken it if there had been more participants.

Bitmain, similarly, have had a pretty easy ride until recently.  They didn't have any real competitors to go up against.  Hopefully, as time goes by, there will be a greater number of successful companies fighting for market share.

My non-technical logic says: we apparently have historical evidence that, given enough motivation and resources (shall we say, Bitmains appetite and technician workforce as a prime iteration of this), there will always be ability to develop a piece of specialised hardware that will deliver what an ASIC does.

So I see anti-ASIC as ASIC-resistant, not ASIC proof. Fully cognisant that there can be no ASIC proof.

The question to ask is not can we make it ASIC proof, but can we make it so continued ASICs development (or whatever tech will replace ASICs) are not easily profitable? Should we even?

I see the same argument with quantum computing. Bitcoin cryptography is highly computing resistant, but never proof, theoretically. I think we can safely assume Bitcoin will upgrade security before quantum computing threat comes close to reality. I'd be afraid if it didn't!

Also food for thought. Bitmain didn't really get to where it was because it had superior tech or because Bitcoin was easy to game... it did because it had a great business model.

It sold older tech and pre-sold hardware that wasn't even ready yet, to fund further research. Great model if you think about it. Research Version 3, using funds collected to order and make Version 2, while operating with income from sales of Version 1. It ensured Bitmain was not only doing corporate mining, but that almost any other independent miner somehow fattened Bitmain.

If it's opaque, then it's hard to know if Bitmain truly controls most of those pools. But I'll open a topic in mining speculation and gather information from the people who might have an idea what's going on.


i sympathize with that position myself. however, there is a distinct possibility that implementing such a hard fork would act as a deterrent against bad actors like bitmain in the future.

there's no precedent for this stuff. is there?