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Topic: Request to the next Litecoin clone developer (Read 783 times)

full member
Activity: 196
Merit: 100

Is Yacoin the only coin who tried to change Scrypt parameters?


I think there is ybcoin doing that now as well but their release mentioned several coins I didn't try to sort it out.

I think ya-coin integrated scrypt-jane into the codebase (that's a library) and there have been a couple of efforts to mess around with it since.  You might search around for references to that, as there was some confusion around here with people thinking that scrypt-jane was the name of a hashing method.

I thought there was another coin in the last few weeks that required the wallet miner at release but I can't be bothered to search right now.

At this time, it's pretty well understood that botnets are going to eat any coin that doesn't have a GPU mining implementation, yeah.

you could substitute "server-farm" for "botnet" same difference to the people that seem to want a coin no one can mine faster than them Wink
legendary
Activity: 1484
Merit: 1005
There was memcoin a while ago

tldr version is that even if you make scrypt use more RAM, it tends to just make the calculation take longer (about linearly with N values) rather than make the calculation any more GPU/ASIC hard.  from the yacminer, even at high values of N GPUs have about a 10-fold higher efficiency over CPUs thanks to the time-memory tradeoff (TMTO)
hero member
Activity: 632
Merit: 500
What happened to Yacoin is interesting. It means that the only way a coin can become viable right now is if it attracts the GPU miners.

You can't have a CPU-coin since botnet and clusters will eat it alive.
FPGA and ASIC usage cannot be done at first since there is nobody in the coin network. You need to have people first.

GPU are the only tools that people own easily while having enough power to protect a network by themselves. There is also a sort of natural selection within the GPU too, only a limited group is efficient enough.

Unless you make mining irrelevant, I don't know how a coin can succeed without the GPUs. And if you make mining irrelevant, you get a distribution problem, since mining is the only way of distributing the coins.

Is Yacoin the only coin who tried to change Scrypt parameters?

hero member
Activity: 1395
Merit: 505
Ditto.  I also spun up an EC2 cluster to mine YAC in the very early days.

Anyone who dreams that their single CPU is going to make any kind of money in the early days of a CPU coin is dreaming ... You'll be competing against guys spinning up thousands of them on EC2 as well as botnets

Best bet is to find an obscure forgotten CPU coin that nobody is mining, mine it for months or years, and hope it returns to popularity
sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 250
♫ the AM bear who cares ♫
I am not sure giving hackers who have botnets the edge over everyone else is a good idea.

Somehow you need to make CPU mining faster if you have a ton of RAM while still allowing GPU with somewhat limited RAM competitive also.

A botnet owner will more then likely not control many machines with 16 gigs of RAM and up. But a user who wants to mine a certain coin might very well go on newegg and buy 100 dollars worth of RAM to mine competitively instead of a 300 dollar GPU if their Intel i3, i5, and/or i7 can out do it.

Yeah, I ran a huge Amazon EC2 cluster right after YaCoin was released. Turned around and sold them before the crash. Made a buttload of money.

The CPU-mined coin thing is a cute concept but it's too scaleable for the little guy to participate. If there were ATi-based GPU clusters on Amazon when Litecoin became valuable (there were only Nvidia clusters), the difficulty rate would've gotten destroyed too.

Basically, GPU is necessary because it's botnet-safe.
NWO
sr. member
Activity: 392
Merit: 250
YAC
legendary
Activity: 2072
Merit: 1001
I am not sure giving hackers who have botnets the edge over everyone else is a good idea.

Somehow you need to make CPU mining faster if you have a ton of RAM while still allowing GPU with somewhat limited RAM competitive also.

A botnet owner will more then likely not control many machines with 16 gigs of RAM and up. But a user who wants to mine a certain coin might very well go on newegg and buy 100 dollars worth of RAM to mine competitively instead of a 300 dollar GPU if their Intel i3, i5, and/or i7 can out do it.
hero member
Activity: 632
Merit: 500
Thanks for the info, didn't knew that Yacoin tried that.

There is so many coins right now, it's hard to follow. I hope the next generation of alt-coins will try to experiment with that.
sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 250
♫ the AM bear who cares ♫
Wasn't this the whole idea behind YaCoin?

Didn't really work out, the GPU miners were just rewritten.
full member
Activity: 196
Merit: 100
I find it a little ridiculous to see all those Scrypt coins and no one has even tried to modify the parameters.


Uhh, you mean except the guys that did, right?
sr. member
Activity: 266
Merit: 250
I second that.
hero member
Activity: 632
Merit: 500
Could you tweak the Scrypt parameters? So you can try and destroy the GPU efficiency of mining Scrypt? That way, you could try for a really more memory intensive coin and aim for a CPU-efficient coin.

Here some info:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11126315/what-are-optimal-scrypt-work-factors

I find it a little ridiculous to see all those Scrypt coins and no one has even tried to modify the parameters.
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