Topic: How to defend against asics or prove Metroid wrong (Read 1243 times)

Agreed ...

Though it would not be that difficult to create a miner based on my above description, to have a modular interfacing system where you could add RAM and other processors as additional, or full replacement hardware. It get's expensive, but doable. Though price really isn't an issue for those that have it. Take the high end server market for example. If the money is to be made, the mainframe/super computer industry pay through the nose with specialized hardware.

If a corporation wants to, and have the funding, anything is possible, no matter what software is created. There will ALWAYS be a market for GPU, but this will dwindle as time (and circuitry manufacturing - thanks to companies like bitmain) become ever cheaper.

#crysx

You are correct in thi aspect ...

ASIC chips do ONE thing and ONE thing well.

But ...

A series of them can do a number of things well (Baikal like Miners - X11 X13 X14 X15 Quark Qubit, Cryptonight, Skein, etc).
A series of ASIC chips and FPGA circuits built on a board similar to GPU can be as adaptive as it wants. Almost any Algo within the limitations of the hardware (like a GPU), but can also be reprogrammed with updated Algorithms also.

That is what I am saying.

#crysx

This is from Timec discord channel, post by one of the devs.
"Well. Currently I'm developing a new algo for TIMEC to get rid of the ASICS.
Meanwhile our web wallet is currently under development.
Once we release both, we'll advertise like hell"

There will be more ASIC resistant algo developed after Ethash failure
Ethereum might be survive in this crypto space since their use case isn't solely as currency (more about dApps platform)
for coins that solely used for currency, ASIC resistant is a MUST to prevent centralization and to invite community participation
I'm pretty sure there will be new anti-ASIC algorithm developed
Now Raven x16r and many more in the future

I believe that the first coin that able to build and implement truly anti-ASIC algo, no premine, no ico, no shenanigans, will win become and the new bitcoin

Or is it just my dream  

hundred new coins lunching up every month. every developer is looking for miners because we make coins to go up or burst (we are the masses behind -  forcing and busting balls of exchanges to list new coins only for devs to sale big chunks at the beginning days of trade). we did that with BTC, ethereum, monero LTC and others. in the same time on the long run every developer forgets about us - so f,,k them. we should create a found. all chip in, make a coin from miners for miners pay few developers for there job in btc and not in our coin. rule by consensus. and all the others f..n coins, we let collapse we could mine some other coins as long as we buy our coin in the end. no premine BS no difficulty jumps (same as btc every 2 weeks) our own mining pools with nicehash ban no pool jumping, super fast (like TIMEC project or DGB) asic resistant. that is all . someone starts this and i am in.

Gamers are also trying to grab GPUs all around the world.

One can wonder if NVIDIA and AMD are doing the same thing as BITMAIN and the others.
It would probably be tempting for them to set up big farms with the latest hardware. Their cost of doing so would be lower than for anyone else by a big margin. And they can still sell the stuff whenever they want.
It's strange that there is still a GPU shortage at this time. There is basically no ROI at all anymore if you take increasing difficulty into account and the used market is beginning to be flooded with mining hardware.
Who is buying new GPUs to the level that distributors can't even get anything?
One explanation could be that both NVIDIA and AMD are prioritizing the more profitable AI and super computer segment at the moment.

If they set up their own farms, it should be possible to detect them. I don't know if their financial reports are transparent enough. If so, maybe one could identify a large increase in power consumption somewhere.

I can't help but think, if Jihan wanted to crack x16r, he'll chain his fucking ASICs and do it. The only thing he needs is motivation and fuckface seems really motivated.

It is either we fork like monero everytime there is a sign of ASICs or we'll let it go.

Or maybe we should focus on GPU's real use cases. I know this kinda means accepting defeat against ASICs but maybe it isn't. I recently came across to this coin: https://rendertoken.com/

Some of you probably familiar with the idea/project already but it seems like a cool idea to me. At least GPU's will be doing what they were invented for in a sense.

Storj is also using HDD's but both Storj (HDD) and Render (GPU) are still tokens. Their tx's happen on the ETH chain and Eth is being secured by ASICs now. We don't want that to keep the chain decentralized.

We need a chain which benefits from GPU's intrinsic value while it secures itself by GPU's at the same time.

For example BURST is securing its chain via HDD's but it lacks the  benefit of HDD's intrinsic value, file storage. I know they plan to do a hard fork to make it available somehow but as far as know It won't be as efficient as storj.

And there is Sia, (was) securing the network via GPU's and sharing files from the HDD's. Got hacked by shitmain. Was a bad idea in the first place because they relied on HDD's for the real work but wanted to secure the network with the GPU's.

We need all in one pack. No tokens, no multiple hardware.

We need a coin which uses GPU's for securing the network and sell their rendering power at the same time. When we achieve that, if bitmain wants to crack this algo, they'll simply have to invent a better GPU than Nvidia/AMD.

Comments:

1) To pile on here, I believe that GPU's have some advantages:

a) To broaden the network argument, GPU's enable a coin hashing network to be more complex. To borrow something from statistical mechanics, coin hashing network complexity goes probably, roughly as the ln(N), where N is proportional to the number of mining entities. GPU mining networks probably have more distinct miners and they are more geographically dispersed. GPU mining has geographical reach.

b) I believe that GPU mining can be greener. The obsolescence lifetime of a ASIC miner is shorter than a GPU card. A 290X card with the lowest power Stilt bios can mine longer than an S1 or an S3. At some point a former high powered GPU can be a $50 ebay card.

c) I believe that algorithm swapping seriously challenges the economics of ASIC miner production.

2) What should happen more is that software dev's should be enlisting the help of FPGA engineers in FPGA proofing their algorithms.

It think a viable long term solution is to monetize distributed compute power and use is as a "proof of compute work".
This is already done, sort of, but not properly, by BOINC, Folding@Home and a handful upcoming AI projects.
It would be much better to use all mining power to perform real, useful, mathematical calculations, AI training or whatever instead of guessing numbers. Such computations can only be performed by a general computer or GPU and the power is actually used for something useful in the end. Exactly how to implement this to secure a blockchain, I don't know but I'm sure it can be worked out. The ever changing code doing the computations perhaps must be dynamically validated and hashed into the blockchain together with the output. The one who figures this out first will probably drive many Lambos...

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I agree with this in many respects, but remember that a lot of distributed AI projects paying to use our CUDA cores are just developing learning algos for megacorp internet marketing. I'm an academic and most machine learning in academia (Stanford's protein folding aside) either deals with datasets orders of magnitude smaller that can be dealt with on local systems, or they get their own CUDA devices (i.e. an astronomy set up just buys some cards for its own use with grant money--this would be cheaper than going through the middlemen AI startups I see on here, which will take a cut).

So we have to remember that just because a project says "AI", it is not necessarily more noble or less "stupid" than POW--its end game is just more spam and pop-up ads for us about Furbees and lawnmowers. And higher margins for traditional corporations and the new crop of middlemen who take the work order and send it out to everyone's devices.

But you are right that improved energy efficiency is needed.

when i did folding @ home, i remember some people would drop certain WUs (work units) because they were under paid (low points) for the work involved and restart hoping to get an easier WU.

the problem is WUs are not equal in difficulty, and points awarded were not always fair compared to the energy used.

there would need to be some sort of way to make sure each WU is equal to all others, and that would mean a central authority would assign those values.

only way POW works is everyone is guaranteed the same work difficulty and what we have now is the best fit. so far.

yeah it would be nice to use that work expended for science/medical but no one has come up with a fair system so far that i know of.

The current POW is doomed in the long term. The main reason is that it's not energy efficient. All this power is wasted just guessing numbers with artificial difficulty. Crypto will never handle mass market adoption and high volumes of transactions without being orders of magnitude more energy efficient. All this is really stupid if you look at the big picture and something better is clearly needed. Asics are more efficient than GPUs for guessing numbers and all would be fine if not the ASIC manufacturers were hostile. BITMAIN & co covertly use the hardware themselves until the market is sucked dry and then sells to big farms mostly. A small amount of ASICS goes to enthusisasts and they always get late to the party and serve as a dump sink for obsolete hardware. Crypto is centralized and put under chineese control... Not much of an improvement

The next logical step in the market evolution is for NVIDIA, AMD, Intel and Samsung to get into this business. I wouldn't be surprised if we soon see NVIDIA and AMD GPUs with onboard ASICS to boost crypto mining. They will be able to build superior units compared to BITMAIN because they already have huge amounts of RAM, bandwidth and efficient software platforms. Think of how easy it would be for AMD and NVIDIA to integrate some Daggerhashimoto ASICs in current GPUs and use existing memory. All they have to do to secure a new generation of very profitable mass market hardware is to strike a deal with the Etherium project so the hardware is not rendered useless due to some defensive forking. They certainly want a bigger piece of this market and BITMAIN is the enemy.

However, current POW is stupid and must evolve.

It think a viable long term solution is to monetize distributed compute power and use is as a "proof of compute work".
This is already done, sort of, but not properly, by BOINC, Folding@Home and a handful upcoming AI projects.
It would be much better to use all mining power to perform real, useful, mathematical calculations, AI training or whatever instead of guessing numbers. Such computations can only be performed by a general computer or GPU and the power is actually used for something useful in the end. Exactly how to implement this to secure a blockchain, I don't know but I'm sure it can be worked out. The ever changing code doing the computations perhaps must be dynamically validated and hashed into the blockchain together with the output. The one who figures this out first will probably drive many Lambos...

What happens next to ethereum will have a lot of weight in the future of ASIC manufacturing.

The community seems to be all for hardforking to a new algo, on the other hand most eth-lead people have been silent(with exception of Vlad).

God dammit I have no immagination according to this April1-o-meter.

no  as fully new algos never done need fully new chips.  and from drawing board to pcb = months  not weeks

you could set difficulty  at  x for a gpu  and at 100x for fast gear

but  an asic can beat that  if I recall  you can  spilt the hash on an asic 

the sp20 from spondoolies could point to multiple pools and mine part of its hash at each one.

I know I’m just a noob, but here are some points to ponder:

No coin is ASIC proof.  An algo is just a set of instructions that a CPU executes, and those instructions can easily be put onto a chip.  Any coin that claims to be ASIC resistant just means they try to make it harder to build an ASIC.

What if the ASIC manufacturers built a box with interchangeable chips?  Any time an algo was updated, they sent you a new chipset and the box was up and running again.  What if they had an eraseable ASIC and you simply downloaded the new algo?

Just like CPU mining gave way to GPU mining, the ASIC will make GPU’s extinct in the mining world.  Where big money is involved, somebody will always come out with a faster and cheaper way to do it.

Changing algos every few months is not the answer, as you’re treating the symptom and not the disease.

I can think of two ways to slow the growth of ASIC mining:
1)  Create two different blockchains/networks for each coin.  One for CPU/GPU and one for ASICs, with two different difficulty levels, giving the ASIC miners no real advantage.

2)  Limit the hashrates on the networks.  Each coin would have to be different, but say the max hash for any single IP on Ethereum was 500 h/s, who would build an ASIC for that?  It would also more evenly distribute the workload.

What if a new coin came out where the algo actually checked the hardware in your system to verify you were using a GPU to mine and not an ASIC?  I wonder what kind of reception it would get.

Just some thoughts...

This is definitely true, but I see it as market economics. When there is a big demand for something, we can supply that. People's wives decide they like amethyst jewelry, those of use forward lookin get to a vein of amethyst quickly, and a day later 50 other guys read the newspaper and show up with their pickaxes. But then the supply outstrips demand, prices go down, some other headlines hit, etc.

As for the 51% attacks I agree they can still happen, but it would be much harder for a bad actor to organize 51% of thousands and thousands of independent small guys, many of whom are trying to help something they see as socially progressive, vs. a small set of asic megafarms selling shares to a bunch of investors screaming for quarterly profits. Just my 2 cents--issues with GPU mining for sure, but let not the perfect be the enemy of the good.

^^^

sounds good to me.

guess i worry about a bunch (as in most) of gpu miners suddenly jumping on the most profitable coin/algo, raising the difficulty to the stratosphere, then going on to the next next coin once the original is worthless because of the difficulty. leaving that coin useless because of the difficulty. seems i recall that happening before. and it happens now on a somewhat smaller scale with profit switching pools.

btw i am assuming the coins attacked are decent mainline coins at that point, not shitcoins which do deserve such a fate.

bcashlol had to do an emergency fork because of hashpower sloshing back and forth, i assume maybe such gpu coins may have to implement something similar?

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I guess this is april fools  above




The reasoning against this  is simple enough.

Trading in exchanges  is very important.  Having lots of coins to trade  drives trading. Think of a 4 coin exchange vs a 400 coin exchange.

Diverse availability from gpu mining allows a guy  in the middle of nowhere Earth mine and trade coins.

To squeeze out the chance at 1 billion little gpu miners  is moron stupid.  Asics will do it. Bitmain shows they are trying to do it.

POW wise, you are right to an extent, you could say the same to asics, even if the asic hashrate is high, a more powerful asic can be created 10x more hashrate and do the same, reason I said pow wise, nothing is fully protected and to me cpu, gpu or asic is the same thing, changing one to another concerning security will not change anything. Now concerning decentralization then cpu/gpu wins hands down cause anybody can buy a cpu or gpu, hardly anybody can buy an asic and when buys an asic you are already outdated cause the manufacturer is using to mine a new version, so asics is a no go to any decentralized network, sia devs is paying badly for their mistake.

A coin that is shitty enough to motivate that kind of attack with current hashrate distributions etc, might just deserve whatever it ends up getting 

And it doesn't have to be a bad thing, a few of the coins that are around today have survived similar attacks and come out stronger.