Topic: What exactly is wrong with LTC? - page 3. (Read 6653 times)

ok a few history and FACTUAL lessons for you all.

LITECOIN is not resistant to any form of computational devices mining it. As long as they can be programmed to do so.
such as CPU,GPU, android phones. and many other devices.

the problem is that the devices such as the bitcoin ASICS have been hard wired to only be able to mine SHA256

litecoin was invented in 2011. asics were invented in 2012. so blame the later for not catering for the former.

the whole "GPU resistant" statement, originally stated on the wiki november 2011 is due to a users with a god complex called Luke-JR, whom has taken it upon himself to try to stop anyone's choice/freedoms of moving away from bitcoin to any other alt currencies people wish to try/use.

because he does not have the power to physically stop you. he can only control the information available on places that he moderates.

it is Luke-JR that makes the comment that litecoin wont succeed and is not worthy of peoples time.

Luke JR and other bitcoin superfans know that deep down, the lingering stench of illegal activities that media highlight about bitcoin will not grow bitcoin at the speeds they desire. he (Luke-JR) knows a sound coin with no negative publicity and nothing structurally wrong with it would succeed better going mainstream. i am not saying guaranteed to exceed in value, i am just saying user adoption would be less of a hurdle to climb.
So he wants to prevent any losses in the bitcoin userbase. He cannot shut down silk road, he cannot find a way to program it so that silk road transactions get ignored. so he is powerless to rid bitcoin of negative press. and from what i have seen. he has not been involved in any main stream expansion attempts outside of the forums.

this is what i call an armchair activist. (big mouth on the sofa, no voice on the streets)

but you have the freedom to mine litecoin if you want no matter what people say. so give it a try, and if you don't like it, you can always go back to how you done things before.

with that said feel free to try all the coins. and if you do want to help main stream a crypto currency i am not saying to not help bitcoin expand into the real world of bricks and mortar businesses. all i am saying is litecoin is a lot less of a headache swaying people away from the media propaganda.

which is at the crux of the whole issue.

Satoshi has never advertised bitcoin as GPU or ASIC resistant, but Litecoin does. Moreover, there was a substantial low hash rate period in 2009, suggesting no GPU was used for mining.

I made it its own thread: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/heres-why-no-one-was-gpu-mining-litecoin-from-the-start-143659
Probably move this discussion there if there's still doubt about this issue.

Let me put this issue about GPU-mining from the start to rest once and for all. I will use cumulative difficulty to figure out how much hashpower has been working on a chain since the start.

There's going to be a lot of math here. First read up on this:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty#What_network_hash_rate_results_in_a_given_difficulty.3F
https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin/wiki/Mining-hardware-comparison

Here are the current state of things:

Litecoin was launched on 10/13/2011 03:00:00 at block #3:
http://explorer.litecoin.net/block/dec173dda2735ff11376b68bdfda804cede230c1fa6f1a11765cddfd8edf4398

We can calculate how much hashpower has been put on the chain since the start using cumulative difficulty.
Let's check a recent block 294537 found on 2/12/2012 03:00:00
http://explorer.litecoin.net/block/a065026ba50a71e1d4979e078265dc9ccf15d0b393969cd35ec4c954bf2c22fb
You can see the cumulative difficulty on the block explorer page.


So we average about 1000 GPUs working on the chain. In other words, if you had 246.67 mhash/s pointed at the chain since launch, you'd have found just as many hashes.

Now, here's what you all wanted to know. How much hashing power was pointed at the chain during the first week.
Here's block 14807 found at 10/20/2011 03:00:00:
http://explorer.litecoin.net/block/6fcf032b2edfd3e06ee6cace9ed9b6c219d8dca06fa1f43a47cb1c5b7f87084f

Let's do the same math:


A month later. Block 31011:
http://explorer.litecoin.net/block/7b08a3bfb5f2a865fc0061f6e3f5b97fa1690c8d357ccd814fd9f55641f83187


Seems like the normal growth of a CPU-only (at the time) coin to me.

ArtForz had 24 5970s. 5970s can do 750 khash/s. If he put those 5970s on mining Litecoin, he would have 18 mhash/s, which is twice the work done on the chain in the first month. Litecoin was put on the exchange pretty quickly and mining litecoins was pretty profitable even with a CPU. If ArtForz had GPU scrypt mining from the start, would he not put those machines on mining Litecoin and make a killing?

So can we now stop spreading FUD?

Edit: After 3 months, effective hashrate is 18 mhash/s (http://explorer.litecoin.net/block/55d1323fa4d7175953fab43ef97c0ef18577d8f000e494740ccc867d42fe67f5)

who cares even if ArtForz has a million billion litecoins?

...no different from early people having tons of BTC. the currency still works the same

This is quite true in my case. The first time I took a look at scrypt() was only on the day that Litecon was launched:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.572019

It took me about a month to read about and understand scrypt():

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.620106

You can also have a laugh at my suggestion of an OpenCL-resistant coin amongst the Solidcoin v2 trollfest about a month before Litecoin launch:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.537010

The only thing I disagree would be "people have looked". In my opinion the trollfest was so intense and emotional that almost nobody tried to make any rational reasoning.

Again: too bad I decided not to keep the IRC logs from my idling on the relevant channels.

In a way you can see the failure of scrypt() parameter selection reoccurring right now in the casascius' thread about BIP 0038:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bip-38-discussion-thread-passphrase-protected-private-key-format-129317

This time there's no trollfest to distract. But there's only one publicly posted scrypt() implementation. And there's a strong motivation to hurry up and just bruteforce to win the competition instead of really analyzing the possible ways of implementing it.

Thanks for the information, that clears up a lot of FUD being spread here.

So that those "in the know" could mine with GPU before the secret got out.  The whole design choice was deception.  The default scrypt parameters (1048567, 8, 1) is essentially a GPU killer, even the authors recommended "lite" option is (16384, 8, 1).    It would have made GPU non-economical (i.e. they could run but at higher cost and energy requirements than virtually any CPU).  The parameters had to be accidentally changed to far extreme to make LTC GPU capable (1024, 8, 1).   A circa 2008 CPU (running single threaded) could verify the "lite" option hash in about 100ms and that time would only decrease with Moore's law.  There was no reason to "cripple" LTC memory hard attribute except that (16384,8,1) couldn't be secretly mined on a GPU.




"Look here GPU resistant cryptocoin.  It is fair for everyone because with only CPU it levels the playing field"



..... some months later ....
oh look you can GPU mine LTC!
"Look here ASIC resistant cryptocoin.  It is fair for everyone because with only GPU it levels the playing field"

Quote from: ArtForz on September 28, 2011, 11:54:41 PM

What I did was modify multicoin to make replacing the block PoW hashing function easier, then plugged in scrypt (http://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt.html) with parameters of N=1024, p=1, r=1, feeding in the block header as password and salt, output size of 32 bytes.

While those parameters would be way too low for a good password hashing/key derivation function (you want lots of margin for the future there), my initial educated guess and further experiments suggest they're still enough to "pessimize" current GPUs and FPGAs to a point where CPUs will easily be competitive... GPUs growing several MB of fast random access on-chip memory in the future might change that.

And yes, choosing such "unusual" parameters is skirting the rule, but in this case imo acceptable risk. Worst case... someone manages to make a "efficient enough" GPU/FPGA/... implementation or a new gen of GPUs comes out, scheduled chain fork switching to higher N and p. Up to N=4096,p=8,r=1 or so time to verify the PoW hash on a CPU shouldn't be an issue, beyond that you'd have to add some measures to prevent "junk block spam" DoS.

Strangely no explanation on why to change it.  The default values work fine as a POW on a CPU.   Also GPU never did get that "MB of fast random access on-chip memory" they still have roughly the same 32KB on chip low latency cache that they did four years ago.  Then again that is more than enough to allow a GPU to compete, it always was.

Some interesting reading for those interested:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/tenebrix-scaling-questions-45849
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.549768

Here are ArtForz's posts: https://bitcointalk.org/?action=profile;u=584;sa=showPosts

If people wanted to see his thoughts, go read his posts. And stop spreading FUD about Litecoin being GPU-mined from the start. Is it possible that it was? Sure, anything is possible. Just like it's possible that Satoshi was ASIC-mining bitcoins from the start and now actually owns 10 million bitcoins.

Yes, I plan to do that soon.


I for one, did not see anything suspicious going on when I launched Litecoin. If I remember correctly, at the start the network hashrate was comparable to about a few hundred CPUs mining and it slowly ramped up from there. If there were any GPUs mining at that time, the network hashrate would be a lot larger than just a few hundred CPUs equivalent.

It's true that I probably should not have taken just ArtForz's word on how gpu-resistant scrypt was with those chosen params. But ArtForz was a very well respected member of the bitcoin community and seemed to know a lot about what he was doing... at least a lot more than me. And he has earned enough bitcoins from the early days, that stealing a ton of scrypt-based coins just seemed beneath him. Plus his reasoning for using scrypt with those parameters were posted months before Litecoin launched, and people have looked over his reasoning and no one came out and said anything against his reasonings.

So no, LTC is not a scam. Do you consider bitcoin to be a scam? Satoshi designed it so that everyone can mine bitcoins and get in on the action. But now one ASIC is about a million times faster than your CPU at mining bitcoins.

If I understood correctly scrypt algorithm requires memory to function, and creating ASICs with memory in them [which is more expensive] will not be feasible at least for a year or 2.
So Unless LTC becomes really high I dont think any company would bother making ASICs for it since these ASICs will even cost more than the traditional BTC ones.

This is just my understanding, correct me if I was wrong

2112 I have no idea what you are talking about , but as long as it means that LTC is sound that is all I need to know. I dont car if someone pre-mined.

I don't know, maybe somebody still has the IRC logs from the channels frequented by Lolcust & Artforz. I didn't keep them, although I idled on all of them for a while: GeistGeld; Tenebrix/Fairbrix, Realcoin, etc. The discussion there was really lively. Many people were more burned by the biting sense of homour of both Artforz & Lolcust; more so than by the premine that Lolcust designed into Tenebrix. In this way the origins of Litecoin are realy murky: one could say it is a Tenebrix-clone but without the trolling and sarcastic humour that was associated with them. It seems that nobody had though to even question or discuss the choice that Artforz had dictated. For a while this forum was full of posts by BitcoinExpress (and others like bulanula) regarding mining and attacking various coins. I think most of them are deleted now. If somebody is hell-bent on obtaining the proof maybe theymos or other administrators would give them copy of the deleted posts from this subforum.

Personally, I don't need the proof: I read the Colin Percival papers and presentations about scrypt & tarsnap. He shows how to choose the optimim parameters for each implementation technology. Artforz had choosen much lower values: so low that they would fit in the on-chip BRAM of Spartan-6 FPGAs.

Without a proof, I view those conspiracy accusation as pure FUD.

OTOH, if you have the technical capability of implementing an alt chain with a better algorithm, making everyone believe it's only mine-able by human brain-cells, while you secretly develop a GPU miner mining it more efficiently, you deserve every penny you "premined".

It's actually a lot fairer than many "software patent" holders protected by IP laws.

 

Why hasn't anyone used scrypt with more the kind of parameters it was intended for instead of perverting / crippling it to make it fit in GPUs? Everyone owns GPUs so doesn't really want to make CPUs competitive?

-MarkM-

Exactly. Scrypt-based mining is not bad but LTC is just a scam

Good point.

The problem is that the crypto currencies are not difficult to create (by forking the code, do some modification, mining with the CPU/GPU). It's really no big deal. The competition is tough. Even BTC also will possibly face the competition in the future. The only crypto coins favored by the god can have a long life.