Topic: Hash algorithm that cannot be implemented in ASIC ? - page 2. (Read 2949 times)

Anything can be implemented in an ASIC, though maybe you could design a hash algorithm that gives modern computers enough of an advantage to discourage ASIC creation. (But I don't know that much about hardware.)

I see two problems with memory-hard PoW:
- If it takes a few seconds to complete one hash, then the network can be DoS-attacked by broadcasting many invalid blocks which nodes then need to waste tons of time checking. It'd be nice to have an asymmetric PoW algorithm that requires much more time to create a PoW than to verify one.
- AFAIK it's not actually that expensive to create ASICs with a lot of memory, and it looks like scrypt ASICs have in fact been created.

I wonder if ASIC design/creation would be made prohibitively expensive if the hash algorithm was especially complex. For example, if the simplest way of representing the algorithm in assembly code was 1 GB in size, I suppose this would be quite difficult to translate to an ASIC, but not any particular obstacle for general-purpose CPUs. You could still create an ASIC that worked like a CPU but with only the subset of CPU features actually used by the hash algorithm, but this'd be pretty expensive to design and might not earn you much extra efficiency.

I also wonder whether it might be good to use a PoW that is especially easy to build an ASIC for, but so simple that the most dead-simple ASIC design is always the best one. Then you'd have to buy hardware to mine, but no ASIC would have much advantage over any other. I don't know if this'd actually help anything since there'd still be economies of scale in power consumption, though.

something that require tons of memory maybe, like scrypt-n with a n factor that should be as a big as a possible, so they need to spend tons of money for their memory/that are not cheap, and in the end it will not be worth it, unless the coin skyrocket

usually if a gpu can mine it, an asic can mine it too at some point, the reason why there aren't asic for x11 algo and many other random algo that there are in the altsection, It is only bound to a point of view of profit...

This list of CPU altcoins should give you some options.

http://altcoins.com/cpu-altcoins

As far as i know, SHA256 can be implemented in an ASIC because it only performs bitwise operations and multiplications using 32 bit integers.
Is there any hashing algorithm that could not be implemented in ASIC ?

Basically, all i need is an operation that cannot be executed on an ASIC.