Topic: The State of Cryptocurrency Mining by David Vorick (Sia) - page 4. (Read 25662 times)

Lots of good info.

I agree with much of it but I need to quote two paragraphs in a bit of time on a pc rather then the phone I am on.

Surprisingly a very good, competent, and on-point article/blog post. Maybe I'm just jaded to have been expecting less but -- damn. Very accurate.
Original blog post

My end of manufacturing insight come from my company being a supplier of equipment made for one thing - mass production of chips. Specifically, laser micro-machined ceramic heat spreaders that power chips are built on. Anywho, each system can produce over 10 million components per-month, biggest customer has over 100 of our latest systems. I get what the author is talking about and he is spot on about costs and equipment availability to make critical parts that are needed to actually produce your product. Very often there is no 2nd source for those components.

Despite such huge production capacity our customers machines are booked for months in advance for, call it limited run 'open availability', along with solid years-long dedicated use contracts for their huge long term customers. In short they run 24x7x365 and the world supply of some critical 'widgets' does have a limit.  The fact that Bitmain can (nearly) buy out a suppliers yearly production is no surprise.

On the ASIC scale, surprised the author has not mentioned Intel, Micron, and others cpu and memory makers developments with CPU on-memory chips that has been going on for at least 2 years now. General term I've read is 'Intelligent Memory'. Originally aimed at very-large database storage and analysis applications to eliminate the round trips between CPU cores, outside memory, and back again.  Each memory stick has a set of cpu's on it to pre-sort data, sort of like a programmable gpu with huge local memory cache.  Sounds like it is perfectly adaptable to flexibility mining algos. Being in fact mainly a DRAM storage memory stick, call it maybe a 5-7 on the author's ASIC scale?

Folks, do take note of the Author's mention of Halong and their dealings.... worthy of another thread methinks?

Again, very good article and very rare I give praise!
Merited.

Satoshi predicted it. He simply said people should be nice and hold off doing the inevitable... The rest of us predicted it too but there isn't actually anything we could do to "address" it as you have said. Bitcoin is a diffuse collaborative and there are no weapons to defend us against transient centralisation of power and hashrate. Proof of work will inevitably ALWAYS have some element of this happening at regular intervals. Changing the proof of work algorithm will NOT, as the article said, make any difference at all; a new asic arms race will simply replace the old one.

Probably the biggest mistake everyone makes is buying stuff off bitmain only to find themselves competing against bitmain... duh.

So given unlimited brain power and funds what would you do to try and change things? Or do you think it's too far gone regardless of what anyone does?

Mining is an area I understand very little of, but I'm surprised it wasn't foreseen that behemoths like Bitmain would rise and something wasn't done to attempt to address it before it happened.

Yes it's a good article and it's accurate. What's frustrating for those of us that lived through the conversion of bitcoin from CPU to ASIC is that the rules and issues have never changed, and we see the same mistakes being made over and over by both new manufacturers and newcomers into the game trying to capitalise on a market they think they understand. Bitmain have got the mining world by the balls and that is not going to change by anyone trying to take them on by the same rules they play by. I've been warning people since the first ASICs got announced but alas no one listened, and then I just gave up trying to warn them... No one seemed to want to believe me and for whatever reason very few every considered consulting me despite my obvious position in the mining world.

Excellent article.  It’s long but well thought out.  Thanks. Looks like if we start getting FPGA with a flexibility of about a 5-6 on your scale we could see them surviving so in the end centralization will go to those with more money than brains. Or ones that look to do harm later.  This system was designed on trust.  I’ll be damn if I trust bitmain to have over 51% control on any network.  They got their money now they could give a shit about what happens.  They keep selling the shovels and those that keep buying don’t even realize they are the ones dooming the entire system.  It’s a sad state of affairs.  Be a huge game of cat and mouse no different that what we have today with fiat.  There’s a reason satoshi needed it to be one pc one vote.  There also would have to be a way to prove you don’t have more than one vote.  Has anyone discussed a way to have a proof of decentralization.  Whereas the value of the system is actually based on the concept that it can’t be easily subverted.  I feel we are losing it with all coins currently in existence.  This will have to be addresses or we might as well all buy ripple. Or just keep with fiat and have blockchains that run on a few raspi. What’s the point of wasting all the energy if decentralization doesn’t matter to anyone here?


BR

https://blog.sia.tech/the-state-of-cryptocurrency-mining-538004a37f9b

A fine overall read here from someone close to the front lines.

TLDR - unless you're Bitmain or someone similar you're probably eventual toast.