Topic: rpietila Altcoin Observer - page 148. (Read 387552 times)
Any XMR holder here didn't fill the survey yet? https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1JqIXkjKpcEpv6lyH6SD22f_Ny0i-rhM9bV21WcOFstw/viewform Just for fun
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The classical altcoins do not offer anything relative to Bitcoin, except maybe a different hashing algorithm. An important thing to remember is that there is no long-term market niche for two coins with the same algo. The hashing power of the larger coin is constantly threatening to destroy the smaller one. Even if that does not happen, there are network effects in play that favor the larger coin and suppress the smaller.
Look at Bitmark: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bitmark-660544
It's a 1-gen altcoin using scrypt PoW, but the dev has a real interesting attitude to this coin's future. Bitmark project is very well organized. Much better than LTC in my opinion. I've been pointing my old scrypt asic to it
Bitmark looks pretty cool.
The super slow distribution curve, weak testing block rewards right now, weak marketing have kept me away from now.
Also the lack of real innovation as far as I can see.
But seems like an honest project. I have my eye on it.
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The classical altcoins do not offer anything relative to Bitcoin, except maybe a different hashing algorithm. An important thing to remember is that there is no long-term market niche for two coins with the same algo. The hashing power of the larger coin is constantly threatening to destroy the smaller one. Even if that does not happen, there are network effects in play that favor the larger coin and suppress the smaller.
Look at Bitmark: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bitmark-660544
It's a 1-gen altcoin using scrypt PoW, but the dev has a real interesting attitude to this coin's future. Bitmark project is very well organized. Much better than LTC in my opinion. I've been pointing my old scrypt asic to it
Poloniex replaced the LTC markets with XMR markets!
https://www.poloniex.com/press-releases/2014.07.23-Poloniex-Welcomes-New-Monero-XMR-Markets
https://www.poloniex.com/press-releases/2014.07.23-Poloniex-Welcomes-New-Monero-XMR-Markets
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Monero, a private, secure, and untraceable cryptocurrency based on the CryptoNote protocol, has been the most actively traded cryptocurrency on Poloniex nearly every day since the addition of the XMR/BTC market. “Since its debut, Monero has been trading in huge volume and has demonstrated impressive resilience during market fluctuations,” Poloniex owner, Tristan D’Agosta stated. “Couple that with an active and strategic development team, and expanding our XMR pairings simply made good sense for our customers.”
A very quick answer is: I've spent a lot of time looking at CryptoNight and believe it to be very solid. There are some potential things to think about in the long term, but assuming you accept its technical tradeoffs (slow block verification leading to increased susceptibility to block-flooding DoS attacks, in favor of a balance between CPU, GPU, and ASICs), I don't believe it's an issue that should be concerning in the next few years.
* The tradeoff of verification time is a good one. Again - that depends on a lot of other factors. It's the part about CryptoNight that makes me most nervous, but there are likely other ways to mitigate block-flooding attacks, so it doesn't need particular panic.
* The tradeoff of verification time is a good one. Again - that depends on a lot of other factors. It's the part about CryptoNight that makes me most nervous, but there are likely other ways to mitigate block-flooding attacks, so it doesn't need particular panic.
It's far from clear that any such trade-off is necessary;
asymmetric PoWs can combine instant verification with architectural balance.
If Monero were to hypothetically achieve some modest measure of global success
I was kind of foggy on what exactly would happen in the future with crypto until recently, but I think Daniel Larimer has unknowingly sealed it's fate with DPOS. Governments don't like to be ejected from money affairs. I foresee them taking something like DPOS, and instead of having 101 delegates, they will simply make each member of the UN a delegate, and boom, you have your New World Order, sovereign approved currency.
That scenario could be good in some ways, since it would most likely make things finite, or get rid of unaccountable government spending in other words, but through increased globalization, it could also be the start of world government, or god know's what else.
*this is not an endorsement to buy bitshares, since they would most likely just clone it and not actually use bitsharesX
I think it is quite clear that governments are starting to figure out what these Cryptos entail. By their very nature they will weaken what we think of as government. No matter if it is Crytpo based coins, App coins, etc. they are going to remove power (and more notably) corruption, from governments. Governments, institutions, etc. will fight it, but it is a losing battle, as the Trojan Horse has been let in and is propagating like a virus. See, first these technologies will be used because greed, I mean efficiency and profits
, will take over. Once they are in the system fully, it will be apparent how they can "improve" government. Improve or remove? - Just a few letters different. Even if Lawlessky tries to control the Cryptos by regulating them to death, the seed has been planted. His days and those like him are limited as far as their power over others are concerned.
It will come down to some very basic premises, which will be based on facts, mathematics, etc. and not "who you know" or (hopefully) how big your army is.
Many often quote that "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." saying - The fight is not even close to being started.
Enjoy the show, it is just getting started.
Its about sharing (and they will be forced to realize this.)
Since we're on the XMR/BBR topic again something that's always bugged me or made me curious at least is the fact that Bytecoin/Monero uses what sounds like a completely new algo(CryptoNight). Which sounds like a really odd choice to me considering what kind of testing and rigor all these other new algos(BLAKE, Grøstl, Keccak ect) have gone through via the NIST competition.
Obviously SHA-2 has been considered a huge success thus far and doesn't look to have any major attacks according to public information despite it being expected to be showing cracks by now(and thus the NIST competition to find 'SHA-3'). Of course no one is using SHA256 anymore in the altscene for obvious reasons, but BBR went with their implementation of ('Wild')Keccak which was the winner of the 'SHA-3' competition and thus went through extremely rigorous testing from some of the top cryptographers in the world.
Maybe I'm thinking this is a bigger issue than it is, but I would expect more people to be complaining about this novel algo that CN uses. Unless of course it's just one or more of those new NIST competition algos with their own name slapped on it. But it doesn't say that on the Bitcoin wiki or the CN website. For all I know it could be worthy of being submitted alongside all those other algos if the competition were still going on but I don't really know.
Obviously SHA-2 has been considered a huge success thus far and doesn't look to have any major attacks according to public information despite it being expected to be showing cracks by now(and thus the NIST competition to find 'SHA-3'). Of course no one is using SHA256 anymore in the altscene for obvious reasons, but BBR went with their implementation of ('Wild')Keccak which was the winner of the 'SHA-3' competition and thus went through extremely rigorous testing from some of the top cryptographers in the world.
Maybe I'm thinking this is a bigger issue than it is, but I would expect more people to be complaining about this novel algo that CN uses. Unless of course it's just one or more of those new NIST competition algos with their own name slapped on it. But it doesn't say that on the Bitcoin wiki or the CN website. For all I know it could be worthy of being submitted alongside all those other algos if the competition were still going on but I don't really know.
The algorithm has little value as a general purpose hashing tool. It is purpose built for proof-of-work.
The design is heavily influenced by the desire to resist attempts to massively accelerate it on GPUs or ASICs, or to put it another way, to ensure that similar-cost devices will perform similarly, at least for some period of time.
So far this objective has been largely achieved with GPUs. GPU miners don't outperform CPUs that much on a hash/$ metric and don't outperform them at all on a hash/W metric. It remains to be seen how well it does with ASICs.
Your point about testing and rigor is valid. It is possible to surmise that with some level of obvious competence having gone into the design, there may have been significant testing, analysis, and scrutiny. Or there may not. Since it is all shrouded in secrecy, we just don't know.
I've been discussing this at length in the XMR thread, but I'm done for a while. I think it's interesting enough that it deserves a more careful writeup, and I'm putting that on my todo list when I have a bit of time for academic-crypto-fun.
A very quick answer is: I've spent a lot of time looking at CryptoNight and believe it to be very solid. There are some potential things to think about in the long term, but assuming you accept its technical tradeoffs (slow block verification leading to increased susceptibility to block-flooding DoS attacks, in favor of a balance between CPU, GPU, and ASICs), I don't believe it's an issue that should be concerning in the next few years.
Note that GPUs *do* outperform CPUs, of course -- it's just that it's only a factor of two or three. Which is pretty remarkable. And an ASIC will likely outperform a GPU, but I'm guessing it will be in the ~5x better range, not huge.
Instead of writing yet-another-long-note about this that will just be ignored, I'm going to devote time later thinking a bit more about a semi-formal analysis of it. I'll annoy AnonyMint here and pull rank: The reason you might believe me in the meantime is that I've broken several other PoW schemes, wrote the optimized code that's in the XMR CPU miners you're using today, and have one of those useless pieces of paper that claims I'm a Ph.D. computer scientist. None of that means I'm right. Nobody has done a seriously rigorous analysis of it. I could be completely wrong! It just means you might feel more comfortable trusting my quick judgement about it than the judgement of some random poster making unsubstantiated claims about its weakness and refusing to back them up with any evidence. And I'm putting it out there under my real name so you can hold me to it; I value my reputation far more than I stand to benefit from convincing people to buy or not buy silly currencies.
What I'm specifically not saying here:
* ASICs won't be better. Of course they will. The question is how much, and I think the answer is "MUCH less beneficial than with bitcoin, and substantially less beneficial than with scrypt."
* CPU-friendly is a good or bad idea. That's a philosophical question outside what I'm discussing.
* The tradeoff of verification time is a good one. Again - that depends on a lot of other factors. It's the part about CryptoNight that makes me most nervous, but there are likely other ways to mitigate block-flooding attacks, so it doesn't need particular panic.
-Dave
I really think Monero is here for the future.
When it comes to ASICs I don't know what will happen either way.
ASICs represent a threat of centralization and ledger control orders of magnitude beyond what form of consumer hardware ever could.
That depends on the lay of the land as and when we get there. If, for instance, the performance gains are not substantial over a CPU with AES-NI, and if we have a sufficiently widely distributed mining network that is a mix of GPUs and CPUs, then ASICs won't provide enough gain. Certainly they would be no more of a threat than GPUs - any entity able to purchase millions of Dollars worth of ASICs can definitely purchase millions of Dollars of GPUs. In fact, if CryptoNight plays out the way dga and the rest of us expect it to, the addition of ASICs to the network will be substantially less bumpy than with Bitcoin and Litecoin.
On the other hand, if ASICs are able to be built that are many orders of magnitude more efficient (both on a cost-per-hash and watts-per-hash basis) than CPUs and/or GPUs, it may dictate a necessary change in PoW to ensure centralisation of mining power does not occur. These are decisions that don't have to be made today, though, as this requires time to play out.
A stated policy of continued ASIC resistance by algorithm modification if necessary should be enough to deter anyone thinking about putting up the large upfront cost of designing chips, no?
Also, if Monero becomes wildly successful I would say that it would be much more of a potential attack target from a bad government actor than Bitcoin would be. Being anonymous and all. The probability of that actually happening might be miniscule though. ASICs or not any government could take down any crypto if they chose at this point. None of this ASIC resistance policy would have any effect on an attack from a government though, I'm not trying to say that the two things are linked.
This is the thing I don't understand when people argue for CPU coins.
The two organizations I can think of with the most CPU cycles available are Google and the NSA.
...
Since we're on the XMR/BBR topic again something that's always bugged me or made me curious at least is the fact that Bytecoin/Monero uses what sounds like a completely new algo(CryptoNight). Which sounds like a really odd choice to me considering what kind of testing and rigor all these other new algos(BLAKE, Grøstl, Keccak ect) have gone through via the NIST competition.
Obviously SHA-2 has been considered a huge success thus far and doesn't look to have any major attacks according to public information despite it being expected to be showing cracks by now(and thus the NIST competition to find 'SHA-3'). Of course no one is using SHA256 anymore in the altscene for obvious reasons, but BBR went with their implementation of ('Wild')Keccak which was the winner of the 'SHA-3' competition and thus went through extremely rigorous testing from some of the top cryptographers in the world.
Maybe I'm thinking this is a bigger issue than it is, but I would expect more people to be complaining about this novel algo that CN uses. Unless of course it's just one or more of those new NIST competition algos with their own name slapped on it. But it doesn't say that on the Bitcoin wiki or the CN website. For all I know it could be worthy of being submitted alongside all those other algos if the competition were still going on but I don't really know.
Obviously SHA-2 has been considered a huge success thus far and doesn't look to have any major attacks according to public information despite it being expected to be showing cracks by now(and thus the NIST competition to find 'SHA-3'). Of course no one is using SHA256 anymore in the altscene for obvious reasons, but BBR went with their implementation of ('Wild')Keccak which was the winner of the 'SHA-3' competition and thus went through extremely rigorous testing from some of the top cryptographers in the world.
Maybe I'm thinking this is a bigger issue than it is, but I would expect more people to be complaining about this novel algo that CN uses. Unless of course it's just one or more of those new NIST competition algos with their own name slapped on it. But it doesn't say that on the Bitcoin wiki or the CN website. For all I know it could be worthy of being submitted alongside all those other algos if the competition were still going on but I don't really know.
The algorithm has little value as a general purpose hashing tool. It is purpose built for proof-of-work.
The design is heavily influenced by the desire to resist attempts to massively accelerate it on GPUs or ASICs, or to put it another way, to ensure that similar-cost devices will perform similarly, at least for some period of time.
So far this objective has been largely achieved with GPUs. GPU miners don't outperform CPUs that much on a hash/$ metric and don't outperform them at all on a hash/W metric. It remains to be seen how well it does with ASICs.
Your point about testing and rigor is valid. It is possible to surmise that with some level of obvious competence having gone into the design, there may have been significant testing, analysis, and scrutiny. Or there may not. Since it is all shrouded in secrecy, we just don't know.
I've been discussing this at length in the XMR thread, but I'm done for a while. I think it's interesting enough that it deserves a more careful writeup, and I'm putting that on my todo list when I have a bit of time for academic-crypto-fun.
A very quick answer is: I've spent a lot of time looking at CryptoNight and believe it to be very solid. There are some potential things to think about in the long term, but assuming you accept its technical tradeoffs (slow block verification leading to increased susceptibility to block-flooding DoS attacks, in favor of a balance between CPU, GPU, and ASICs), I don't believe it's an issue that should be concerning in the next few years.
Note that GPUs *do* outperform CPUs, of course -- it's just that it's only a factor of two or three. Which is pretty remarkable. And an ASIC will likely outperform a GPU, but I'm guessing it will be in the ~5x better range, not huge.
Instead of writing yet-another-long-note about this that will just be ignored, I'm going to devote time later thinking a bit more about a semi-formal analysis of it. I'll annoy AnonyMint here and pull rank: The reason you might believe me in the meantime is that I've broken several other PoW schemes, wrote the optimized code that's in the XMR CPU miners you're using today, and have one of those useless pieces of paper that claims I'm a Ph.D. computer scientist. None of that means I'm right. Nobody has done a seriously rigorous analysis of it. I could be completely wrong! It just means you might feel more comfortable trusting my quick judgement about it than the judgement of some random poster making unsubstantiated claims about its weakness and refusing to back them up with any evidence. And I'm putting it out there under my real name so you can hold me to it; I value my reputation far more than I stand to benefit from convincing people to buy or not buy silly currencies.
What I'm specifically not saying here:
* ASICs won't be better. Of course they will. The question is how much, and I think the answer is "MUCH less beneficial than with bitcoin, and substantially less beneficial than with scrypt."
* CPU-friendly is a good or bad idea. That's a philosophical question outside what I'm discussing.
* The tradeoff of verification time is a good one. Again - that depends on a lot of other factors. It's the part about CryptoNight that makes me most nervous, but there are likely other ways to mitigate block-flooding attacks, so it doesn't need particular panic.
-Dave
That decentralised exchange appears to use three servers to store coins.
In other words, it's not decentralised.
I don't get it.
In other words, it's not decentralised.
I don't get it.
When you generate a deposit address, the key is cut in 3 parts and stored on 3 different servers. This avoid having keys stored on the Nxt client that could potentially get stolen.
Since then, all transfers and trades happen on the Nxt Blockchain so everything is decentralized except the address generation.
If Monero were to hypothetically achieve some modest measure of global success
I was kind of foggy on what exactly would happen in the future with crypto until recently, but I think Daniel Larimer has unknowingly sealed it's fate with DPOS. Governments don't like to be ejected from money affairs. I foresee them taking something like DPOS, and instead of having 101 delegates, they will simply make each member of the UN a delegate, and boom, you have your New World Order, sovereign approved currency.
That scenario could be good in some ways, since it would most likely make things finite, or get rid of unaccountable government spending in other words, but through increased globalization, it could also be the start of world government, or god know's what else.
*this is not an endorsement to buy bitshares, since they would most likely just clone it and not actually use bitsharesX
Did anyone tell about the MultiGateWay of Nxt ?
http://bitcoinist.net/multigateway-new-decentralized-exchange/
http://multigateway.com/
http://multigateway.com/user-guide/installing-the-software/
https://nxtforum.org/multigateway-jl777/
https://nxtforum.org/umgwc/
https://nxtforum.org/umgwc/umgw-ui-release-v1-3e/
It's working, I am using it.
Basically you can trade Nxt for Bitcoin or Litecoin, soon Darkcoin (I know fuck that coin) and more crypto soon.
It is a decentralized exchange that you use from the Nxt client.
All transactions are based on the Nxt blockchain. No cheat, no theft, no scam, ...
Isn't it what cryptocurrencies always needed ?
That decentralised exchange appears to use three servers to store coins.
In other words, it's not decentralised.
I don't get it.
The Nxt exchange works on the blockchain and is decentralised.
However the gateway part isn't decentralised, because the bitcoin keys are held by someone. The actual sending of bitcoins is not handled automatically.
You are right, I think people are getting confused between the gateway and decentralized exchange where they are issued.
Correct me if I am wrong.
Did anyone tell about the MultiGateWay of Nxt ?
http://bitcoinist.net/multigateway-new-decentralized-exchange/
http://multigateway.com/
http://multigateway.com/user-guide/installing-the-software/
https://nxtforum.org/multigateway-jl777/
https://nxtforum.org/umgwc/
https://nxtforum.org/umgwc/umgw-ui-release-v1-3e/
It's working, I am using it.
Basically you can trade Nxt for Bitcoin or Litecoin, soon Darkcoin (I know fuck that coin) and more crypto soon.
It is a decentralized exchange that you use from the Nxt client.
All transactions are based on the Nxt blockchain. No cheat, no theft, no scam, ...
Isn't it what cryptocurrencies always needed ?
That decentralised exchange appears to use three servers to store coins.
In other words, it's not decentralised.
I don't get it.
Establishing a policy position would be good for the social contract. What you do not want is for ASICs to be developed in the first place. You can't prevent it, but you can avoid defaulting on a social contract by making a policy statement now. Once ASICs are developed, changing the algorithm is impossible without defaulting on the current contract, unless you have established the terms of that contract in advance, to allow responsive change.
Again, if you don't establish a policy position, then if you make a responsive change, you are destroying the value of an investment made by XMR supporters. That's just dirty. Don't do it. Make the policy statement. That will mitigate uncertainty. It will mean that anyone who invests in a CN ASIC is fully responsible for the outcome. It will avoid creating a foreseeable condition in which you must behave in bad faith to save the coin.
Again, if you don't establish a policy position, then if you make a responsive change, you are destroying the value of an investment made by XMR supporters. That's just dirty. Don't do it. Make the policy statement. That will mitigate uncertainty. It will mean that anyone who invests in a CN ASIC is fully responsible for the outcome. It will avoid creating a foreseeable condition in which you must behave in bad faith to save the coin.
It's still not necessary to do so right now. We need more information to make a stand one way or another, and that information will come with time. I'm not implying that we'll take forever to do so, but it needs a great deal of discussion and an analysis of the PoW by more people than have presently done so. This has to play out over several months so that there are more eyes on the hashing code and a determination can be made.
I also don't agree with you that ASICs are inherently bad. The point of CryptoNight is to close the performance gap between CPUs, GPUs, and ASICs. Not to eliminate GPU or ASIC mining. Not to satisfy some claim of being "ASIC resistant". But to close the performance gap, thus meaning that ASICs provide no centralisation of any note, as CPU and GPU miners can continue to mine semi-efficiently. I am personally of the opinion that if, and ONLY if, it is clear that it is going to fail in that singular task does it make sense to look at alternatives.
I also think there's a large degree of futility in pushing back on ASICs by changing the PoW (although I am intrigued by r0ach's suggested method, I think that gives pause for thought). What happens when 3D printers get to a stage where they can print 30nm chips? Then you fork an algorithm change, and everyone just downloads a new chip design and prints it.
As a final note: ASICs can actually have a very amazing purpose. If Monero were to hypothetically achieve some modest measure of global success, the expensive PoW could make lightweight mobile clients extremely heavy (if they're verifying blockchain headers on catch up, for instance). A CryptoNight ASIC built into the mobile device's SoC (or even the inclusion of AES-NI style extensions in the SoC) would alleviate this to a large degree. Pushing against ASICs makes this impossible, and I have yet to hear a reason compelling enough to sacrifice this end-user functionality.
Did anyone tell about the MultiGateWay of Nxt ?
(...)
Is there a fee, and if yes, who gains it?(...)
You pay 1 Nxt to create a deposit address.
You pay 1 Nxt to create buy or sell order of any amount.
These Nxt will eventually come back to you if you let your client connected with the forging enabled.
It says no trading fees. It's a shame there's no way for NXT users to prove that the initial distribution of coins didn't go entirely to one single guy using mule accounts, or a number of people that can be counted on one hand. It seems like it has more development than any coin out there.
The initial distribution happened when Nxt reached the first exchange DGEX.
At that moment you could buy few millions Nxt for 1 BTC.
It is a decentralized exchange that you use from the Nxt client.
All transactions are based on the Nxt blockchain. No cheat, no theft, no scam, ...
Isn't it what cryptocurrencies always needed ?
What is needed is easy usage. People rather store their coins on exchanges so they don't have to install wallets, keep them updated, and download huge blockchains. All transactions are based on the Nxt blockchain. No cheat, no theft, no scam, ...
Isn't it what cryptocurrencies always needed ?
I agree that mainstream come when you don't have to use your brain to do things.
Nxt is on it's way for wider adoption. The Nxt client used to be the worst ever client, now it looks awesome and have exclusive features.
It is a decentralized exchange that you use from the Nxt client.
All transactions are based on the Nxt blockchain. No cheat, no theft, no scam, ...
Isn't it what cryptocurrencies always needed ?
All transactions are based on the Nxt blockchain. No cheat, no theft, no scam, ...
Isn't it what cryptocurrencies always needed ?
What is needed is easy usage. People rather store their coins on exchanges so they don't have to install wallets, keep them updated, and download huge blockchains.
For an actual "anti-ASIC" social contract, you could wait for the first algorithm to be entirely ASIC monopolized, then soft fork to have an additional algorithm for distribution, Myriadcoin style, but you limit it to either 3 or 4 total PoW algorithms. The idea is just to maximize market penetration for the coin distribution. If Bitcoin did something like this originally, altcoins would either not exist, or only have 1/100th of the current number. There would be much higher interest in BTC as well, since ordinary people would actually have some.
Would ordinary people have some though? Data centers and optimized racks would still push the average person with their celeron or atom processor on their laptop way out the mining profitability range.
For an actual "anti-ASIC" social contract, you could wait for the first algorithm to be entirely ASIC monopolized, then soft fork to have an additional algorithm for distribution, Myriadcoin style, but you limit it to either 3 or 4 total PoW algorithms. The idea is just to maximize market penetration for the coin distribution. If Bitcoin did something like this originally, altcoins would either not exist, or only have 1/100th of the current number. There would be much higher interest in BTC as well, since ordinary people would actually have some.
When it comes to ASICs I don't know what will happen either way.
ASICs represent a threat of centralization and ledger control orders of magnitude beyond what form of consumer hardware ever could.
That depends on the lay of the land as and when we get there. If, for instance, the performance gains are not substantial over a CPU with AES-NI, and if we have a sufficiently widely distributed mining network that is a mix of GPUs and CPUs, then ASICs won't provide enough gain. Certainly they would be no more of a threat than GPUs - any entity able to purchase millions of Dollars worth of ASICs can definitely purchase millions of Dollars of GPUs. In fact, if CryptoNight plays out the way dga and the rest of us expect it to, the addition of ASICs to the network will be substantially less bumpy than with Bitcoin and Litecoin.
On the other hand, if ASICs are able to be built that are many orders of magnitude more efficient (both on a cost-per-hash and watts-per-hash basis) than CPUs and/or GPUs, it may dictate a necessary change in PoW to ensure centralisation of mining power does not occur. These are decisions that don't have to be made today, though, as this requires time to play out.
A stated policy of continued ASIC resistance by algorithm modification if necessary should be enough to deter anyone thinking about putting up the large upfront cost of designing chips, no?
Also, if Monero becomes wildly successful I would say that it would be much more of a potential attack target from a bad government actor than Bitcoin would be. Being anonymous and all. The probability of that actually happening might be miniscule though. ASICs or not any government could take down any crypto if they chose at this point. None of this ASIC resistance policy would have any effect on an attack from a government though, I'm not trying to say that the two things are linked.
When it comes to ASICs I don't know what will happen either way.
ASICs represent a threat of centralization and ledger control orders of magnitude beyond what form of consumer hardware ever could.
These are decisions that don't have to be made today, though, as this requires time to play out.
Establishing a policy position would be good for the social contract. What you do not want is for ASICs to be developed in the first place. You can't prevent it, but you can avoid defaulting on a social contract by making a policy statement now. Once ASICs are developed, changing the algorithm is impossible without defaulting on the current contract, unless you have established the terms of that contract in advance, to allow responsive change.
Again, if you don't establish a policy position, then if you make a responsive change, you are destroying the value of an investment made by XMR supporters. That's just dirty. Don't do it. Make the policy statement. That will mitigate uncertainty. It will mean that anyone who invests in a CN ASIC is fully responsible for the outcome. It will avoid creating a foreseeable condition in which you must behave in bad faith to save the coin.
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