Topic: What's best - SHA256 or Scrypt? - page 3. (Read 3936 times)

*cough* That doesn't help the rest of us Vivi... i.e the people who can't mine with GPU.

The only think I disagree with primarily and that is that someone has to treat it as a commercial venture. They don't. The more attention, care, time that is paid to a coin will make it successful not how much money you can throw at it, because that is a pump and dump scheme. It's very much like taking a bag full of coppers into a penny arcade. You went into it to have fun...not to be a high stakes gambler and if you play your coins right you could end up walking out with a copper more than you went in.

Rome wasn't built in a night and neither was Bitcoin.

The problem isn't based on people being afraid or not willing/ready to buy an ASIC.  I myself am in the process of purchasing an ASIC, I am just watching the BFL backorder log to dissipate.  And I'm not buying it to make money, as I know for a fact it will be losing money very shortly.  Just watch the Bitcoin difficulty jump by millions every week more ASIC's are slowly being shipped out.  Merged mining a coin that is worth $0.00001 won't make them turn into money making beasts, it's more "Woohoo I just earned an extra $1 this month merge mining Vlad's coin    

Our advice to you was based on what would be the safest alternative for a new coin coming onto the market.  SHA256 does not mean the coin will be worth more.  Not even having 1 million miners on your coin make it worth more (Just more secure).  And small GPU miners can mine SHA256 just as easily as they can mine scrypt.  It makes no difference to them what they mine.  Aside from the fact they will want to invest their time/electricity/cooling costs into a currency that they think is stable, and not be killed at any time.

The problem is you don't understand even the basics of what your getting into.  You believe your coin which will be worth less than a cent in the beginning will be embraced by Bitcoin miners, and that people will go out of their way to do all the programming to get your essentially free coin merge mined with all the big players.  And you believe your coin will easily survive a 51% attack on it, because you believe in it.  

First off, your coin will be worth nothing at all, no matter if you choose scrypt or SHA256.  The reason coins start becoming worth something is not because people start mining it.  It's because people start believing your coin is secure, and they start putting their money into it to make it worth something.  You also need to have services willing to take your coin as an actual currency.  No one is going to be sitting there with a 50 BTC buy offer the moment your coin hits Cryptsy (if it even manages to get there with your attitude of who cares if my coin is 51% attacked) when you are treating it like a playground.  You have said it multiple times in your many posts, it isn't costing you much, and your the only one that will end up losing your money and time if the coin is crushed.  That attitude will drive away any investor you're hoping to get, which will leave you sitting on a coin still worth $0.0001, which will stop being mined because people lose faith in your currency.

To put it in perspective, I will give you a real world analogy for what you're doing.   Its like you are building a new bank.  You don't have the money for insurance, you are asking people if you should build it in a safer neighbourhood, or in a neighbourhood where banks get robbed on a daily basis.  And to make matters worse, you announce you're not having any guards on staff and you can't afford the lock on the vault.  But you want people to store their millions in your bank, and if everything does get robbed and your bank gets burnt down, you don't care because the building only cost you $500 because of the neighbourhood you choose.  And to make matters worse, you want to charge the people that are storing their money 1%, because you are sticking out your time and $500 to build the bank in the first place.

A successfull 51% attack could cause everyone's assets "Money they put into your currency" to be cashed out by the attacker.  He makes a fortune, or nothing becuase he just wanted to see if he could destroy a smaller one to hone his skills on a larger target.  After a coin is 51% attacked, it is almost always dead after that.  I can only think of 1-2 exceptions where I believe the coin still exists.  In cases like Powercoin, which was 51% attacked recently, the attacker took around 2 million Powercoins.  No exchange would touch it after that, since the guy could cash in those coins at any time after.        

If you truly want to become rich in the Cryptocurrency game.  I will tell you the EASY way to do it.  DON'T become a coin developer.  Find an established coin that is trading for about $0.00001.  Put $10,000 into it, and start buying.  This alone will drive the price upwards.  Next put your "marketing skills" to work, and get an economy going in that coin.  You don't need a developer's ok to build an economy for them.  And I am sure they would readily do whatever they could to promote you in your venture.  Get that $0.0001 coin to have a value of about $1.  Congrats you're now a multi-millionaire.  Sell it off slowly, so you don't crash your market, and lose your value.

The mechanics of SHA-3 offer little different from SHA-2. Scrypt, on the other hand, is a fundamentally different beast. The way forward is almost entirely likely to be with scrypt unless something that is similar-but-better to scrypt comes along. Continually wasting money and resources on completely useless pieces of machinery (ASICs) is not good for decentralization or sanity.

That's a tad harsh. People  do whatever is likely to net them the best rewards. In this case, they see bitcoin as somewhere to 'make' money and to do that they need to invest in ASICs. It is not the fault of the miners who are doing everything they can to be the best they can be. It is the fault of the designer for not taking into account Moores law and defending against it. (It's obvious that there was some thought, to tech advances, just not enough).

Scrypt is what has arisen out of this need to help smaller players and the new digital currency will be born eventually. Bitcoin will not, cannot succeed, but it has done its job and carved out the niche the path forward for developers to search after. I don't even think that any digital currency based on Scrypt is going to make the cut either. If anything then it'll be a currency based on SHA-3 that's likely to hit the big time. You'll probably see Bitcoin and a variety of others flounder until the next economical problems arise and then there will be another flurry of activity, that much is obvious.

In the future I hope to see cryptocurrencies that are designed with an extremely wide reach and not just those with high spec computers designed specifically for Bitcoin mining, because that's the whole point and I think...the point behind Scrypt. But even still it's wrong to eject those who are doing the best they can with what they are able to get a hold of. It's just simple capitalism.

No. Two different blockchains means two different coins, basically. Vendors would need to accept both, people would need two addresses, full nodes would have to run two... just... no.

as opposed to the people who pre-ordered ASICs over a year ago? What form of interest would that fall under?


More like acting out of foresight. Keep thinking we are misinformed when you and every other fuckhead who found out about bitcoin 3 months ago plugs in their ASICs and gets the same fucking results as they do now with GPUs. The only difference is, the manufacturers of these machines are obviously stalling as long as possible in the interest of pure profits. They do not care about you or anyone else desperate enough to pre-order their shit.


You spent 1,700 dollars on your mining rig and turn around and wonder why you don't make any profits? People like you are the reason ASICs even exist in the first place. You are totally looking at them the wrong way, and can't see anything beyond your own fucking greed. People who tout ASICs as the future are solely saying that because they feel like they can still gain a leg up on everyone else by buying them. The problem is when the product you are banking on being released is currently being used to do exactly what you plan to do with it before too many people get their hands on them, you have already lost. Bitcoin is not about furthering the coin's widespread support anymore, it is just operating under that guise with the real agenda being OBLIGATORY, OBVIOUS, and OBLIVIOUS greed.


You act like your future project coin will gain any sort of respect, when you constantly contradict yourself and provide no evidence of the ability to look at things objectively. You are not part of the "small miner group" when you fully support the very thing that is pushing that group out of Bitcoin. People tout Bitcoin as being decentralized and allowing anyone to be able to join network, when in reality, a handful of companies are releasing stalling the very devices that will wipe it's ass with that notion while keeping foolish people such as yourself running in line to attach themselves to the puppet strings.

Making a coin that can be merge-mined is actual work, not just a cut-and-paste job.

I voted Justin Bieber, because its just true .

{although that whole MJ thing she's doing is getting a little creepy}

your surprise could come from the basic error in the question that you asked - you made some assumptions in the topic that were basically flawed , you equated ASIC shipments and access with "Profit Ratio".

these two things are very different .

I'm gonna get to bed.  Hopefully tomorrow these programmer guys will get back to me.

Goodnight.

I agree, i'm part of the small miner group.  That's why I wanna do a miner's coin.

I got so frustrated with my first mining rig which cost $1,700 which barely mined enough to pay the electricity (LTC POOL mining) that I took it back to Fry's and lost $300 on the deal.

I wanna help change that experience.  I want mining to be a bit more fun And rewarding and not such a flatline experience and I really think this VGB Protocol will help and this 10% distribution will be the icing in the cake.

I can't wait!

Perhaps most people are. I'm not, I simply just want to be able to take part, nothing more nothing less. It's of my opinion that mining should be for everyone not just the few with high spec computers.

Justin Bieber got more votes than SHA256. That was the reason for that question.

Yeah, it's pretty clear, most people aren't ready for ASIC mining or merge mining.  And since this coin is designed for miners then scrypt it is.  And that's final.  If this works out I can always launch an even better coin for SHA256. 

Thanks for all your inputs.  It was hard letting go of the merged mining idea.  I just assumed most people were already doing it or in the process of buying ASICS. Maybe in a year or two.

Vlad, the miners want scrypt apparently. (I voted undecided and unfortunately I can't change my vote) and Wolf has a point two different block chains mean two different coins. The market would choose the Scrypt coin and dump the Sha because they see it (I see it) as a coin that's likely be around for a while. The best long term coins offer low yet consistent reward.

Hey how about this?

What rule says I need to be stuck on one or the other?  Why can't I launch a SHA256 coin and the same exact coin on Scrypt.  I mean its a total cut and paste job for the most part so I can probably get a break on the programming for the second coin.

I mean, if you saw a dual Litecoin launch wouldn't you say, oh cool, I can mine that later when I get an ASIC but for now I'll mine the Scrypt version.  Why not?  It's just more money for the launch but if they survive each will be supported by their respective mining community - SHA256 vs Scrypt.

And what a wonderful experiment - this would answer a lot of unknowns and a lot of questions for future coin launches and you get to see how each one performs by comparison since everything is equal except the cryptography.

That's the best way and I think a lot of debs would be curious to see what happens and which version stays on top or succeeds more and many may tweak their future launches based on this experiment.

Now I need to find out how much extra a programmer would charge for a dual launch.  This way everyone is happy, a true miner's coin.

Nuggets 1.0 and Nuggets 2.0....lol

And I'm not seeing this as a playground but a Serious endeavor.  That's why I'm asking all these questions and running all these polls.  I really want to release a serious and respectable coin so I don't care about the short term profits - long term is where things get interesting and more rewarding for everyone.

@zas,

I have faith in this coin otherwise why would I launch it with a 3 day warning and on SHA256 where it can get killed?

Why would I want to avoid SHA256 if you yourself are saying the price of the coin will go considerably higher than scrypt?   You're saying I'll lose my objectivity and become corrupt and dump everything and ruin the coin, right?  What am I gonna dump, there's no premine and the 1% I'd get would be peanuts compared to the whole market.

And I have a bit more control than that. If I was doing this for profits first I Would have gone with my CatholicCoin idea cause I personally believed that coin would have brought in a large stable Christian user base. 

So far I have altered this coin launch per the wishes of the miners and the alt community cause I want to avoid another crap coin but I have to tell you, this SHA256 vs Scrypt part is hard for me to let go cause it makes so much more sense to do SHA256.  And I disagree, it shows I have a lot of confidence in the coin as it means I think it will survive a very likely 51% attack.


I get the feeling most people voting for scrypt are doing so simply out of personal interest - it's easier to mine a scrypt coin if you're a small miner but that's because most people don't realize how cheap and available ASICS will be in the coming year so they're just misinformed and acting out of fear.  I'm a small guy and I'm buying what ASICS I can cause I see huge money in merged mining.

Not the $1.20 per day I was clearing with a new dual 7850 GPU rig.  For that money you can get nearly a 40GH BFL ASIC and make 10-20 times more money even with a way higher difficulty by focusing on merged mining.  It looks like the majority of miners aren't seeing this possibility or maybe they don't want to risk buying ASICS.

I've been very outspoken on here, there's gonna me a lot of guys gunning for any coin I launch. 

So I say it all rides on what a programmer says about how hard or easy it would be to make a new SHA256 coin so it can merge mine. If it's easy then it's a done deal but if not then i'll probably go with Scrypt cause if rather spend my money on real features.

Ok, now we're making progress.  I finally got a clear answer.

I didn't know what you meant by scrypt has better security.  You were talking about the ease of 51% attacks on SHA256.  On that regard I don't care, I truly want to let the market decide:  make or break this coin.  I think that will be a true test.

And of course a person can have a great coin and some idiot kills it cause he's got 5 Tera Hash ASIC rigs and like you said, not cause the coin sucks but just because he can.  That's my only worry but I still want to see if this coin can pass such a test as it would say a lot to me.

Then the code writing - it would help so much if I knew more cause I hear different things all the time. I thought to make a coin so it can be merge mined was fairly simple if you think of it from the get-go, which I am.  Cause without the possibility of merge mining it doesn't make much sense to do SHA256.  That was the biggest reason.

So I need to ask some programmers - how difficult is it to make a new SHA256 coin so that it can be merge mined with the likes of Bitcoin.  I mean, I imagine 95% of the code is copy and paste, I don't see what would require so much work for a merge mine feature but then again, I was saying SHAW instead of SHA until some guy corrected me today so that's how much I know.

If a programmer can chime in I would appreciate it cause the best profits are in mining multiple coins at once.  TIA!

I'd probably like to point out that if you're trying to do this for profit, it's going to be a pump and dump scheme. That's all there is to it. Treating it like a playground, a game if you will (because that's what it is to be honest), will deter the larger players and encourage the very smaller players. Much like a penny arcade where people are just enjoying themselves compared to that big ass casino down the road where everyone is trying to game the system. Once profit comes into it, you lose your objectiveness as money is a bit different.

Now. Scrypt is apparently somewhat more difficult to break by big miners, this is a protection to smaller miners who aren't going to be fussed about any kind of multi-mining to begin with at least for the first year or so. It's quite possible that you could start up another alt-coin, a sister coin that you could do merge mining with but that's apparently the only advantage of Sha-256d. Basically, by going with Sha-256d you are saying that you don't have any faith in your own currency and by going with Scrypt you are supporting smaller miners.

The reason and the only reason not to choose SHA256 is because of ASIC's yes.  But not the fear of them coming.

The reason is.  Right now ASIC's are worth a pretty penny, and Bitcoin is struggling.  Everyone is going to be focusing on getting their money's worth with their miner which means they won't be mining a coin worth a penny or 2.  So when you launch you will only be attracting GPU miners that are interested in the next new coin.  And it will be that case for quite some time until after you can generate some value into your coin.  During that time, you may be looking at having 10-20 Ghash/s of hashing away on your network.  It's not hard to see that anyone that has just received their 50 GHash/s BFL ASIC miner can easily 51% attack your coin.  Just to say they did it.  This is where the security risk is when launching a new coin based on SHA256.  If on the other hand you had your 10-20 MHash/s scrypt coin going.  It will take someone with a decent sized GPU farm to pull it off.  It would essentially be a guy with that $20,000 rig you liked the photo of his equipment.  There are a lot less guys like that then there are guys receiving their BFL shipment (Well that can still be debated  LOL ) And that is where the security in Scrypt lies for newly launched coins.  It takes fairly dedicated equipment to pull it off, and not a rogue guy having fun.

If your coin survives it's infancy, and someone actually decides to write to code to merge mine your coin along side Bitcoin (which would be a longshot), or you get a few ASIC's mining for you, then suddenly your security problems are no worse then they were if you were on a scrypt coin.  Here is a promise though.  The Scrypt coins will always be around, and GPU miners will always exist.  Heck a few of the new coins are going back to the basics and only allowing CPU processing.  The purpose of Hashing in the first place is to spread the power over as many people as possible.  Video cards will always have a purpose outside mining, and Scrypt based coins like Litecoin won't be flipping over to SHA256.