Topic: Why ASIC's Should Not Be The Future Of Crypto Currencies - page 3. (Read 11103 times)

Satoshi was an intelligent man. He was well aware of the possibility of a hardware mining development arms race. Also one can make the following observation:

There was only 1 GPU chip manufacturer who dominated mining farms: AMD.
Today there are 2 FPGA chip manufacturers who are at the basis of all FPGA farms: Altera (in the BFL Single), and Xilinx (Spartan6-LX150 in all others).
And soon there will be 3 vendors of ASIC mining chips: BFL, Tom's, and nghzang's companies.
So we are actually becoming more decentralized over time.

IMHO the number of owners of the IP (intellectual property) of the technologies at the core of Bitcoin mining is a better indicator of how resilient (which is what you mean by decentralized I think) Bitcoin mining can be, assuming hypothetical scenarios where hostile parties would try to take control of, or negatively affect, this technology. It is not the number of resellers or distributors that matters (like you point out there are many AMD graphics cards resellers).

I'm trying to figure out what your ideals are because what you originally said reads like "I want other people to give me stuff for free but unfortunately they won't unless I trade them something of equal value".

And yet so many bitcoiners try to discourage newbies from applying their CPUs and GPUs to altcoins that such hardware can still manage to mine some of so they can get involved in the cryptocurrencies scene from that small-change angle to get a taste for mining and see if they think they might want to move up to the big leagues by buying an ASIC (only $150 fergoshsakes), setting up p2pool and merged-mining all the coin types they can...

-MarkM-

I find all these threads about ASIC bringing about the downfall of bitcoin and/or crushing profit potential hilarious. Back when you could only mine with CPU everyone would freak out if someone had a gazillion cpus hashing away. Then along comes the ability to hash with gpu and everyone would cry OMG all the time and effort i spent setting up my awesome cpu mining farm have been for nothing. Now here comes the asic and everyone is doing the same thing that has been done everytime a new tech become available. If you want to mine with an asic go buy one. They really arent that expensive when you consider how much it costs to start a rig from scratch using gpus. Will the rich kids have an advantage? Of course dont they always? Does that mean you cannot even the field a bit? Of course you can. Im willing to bet that when tech changes again there will be a ton of threads once again complaining about everyones asics not being up to snuff because i can use this new and improved widget to hash at 4000Th/s or something. It is all a race to get to the end of the block reward. Enjoy the journey

Good post kjj.

#1 Same here bro, I hear ya!

#2 It's not the ASIC to be blamed, is the greed part of the human nature, which some may argue is good and some may argue is bad. In the Bitcoin case, the greed does have a "good part" no matter on which side you're arguinmg, the part that brings more efficiency and better technology to the table. However greed's inherent "bad part" is always damaging to the society as a whole if you have liberal views.

That puts you in rare company here.  Most of us regard "greed" as a good thing, the force that drives progress.


ASICs were inevitable.  You might as well complain that the sun sets in the evening.


Atlas is a special case.  He really does need to STFU/DIAF.  Or at least have his psychiatrist adjust his meds.

As to other dissenting opinions, I haven't seen any real hostility.  Sadly, most of the dissenting opinions start with premises that are not widely considered to be true here, and the arguments raised by the dissenters rarely rise above the level of repeating their assumptions.

For example, your opening paragraph makes it pretty clear that you feel that "money, greed and elitism" are bad things.  Most of us disagree, and no matter how self-evident their badness may be to you, if you just assert your position over and over again, we'll get annoyed.  (See Atlas...)


Money is not wealth.  I bolded it because it is a superbly important concept, and one that most people fail to understand.  Money is a means to facilitate trades of wealth across time and space.  If you were hoping that bitcoin was going to steal the wealth of those that produced it and give it to those that did not, then yeah, bitcoin will be a "failure" in those terms, just as fiat has been.

I agree it is incoherent and malicious.

It's disheartening to want to be something you can never be and to have to do things that are against your ideals.

I've got this addiction to life and it makes me do terrible things.

Can you explain what this means? I've tried to figure it out but every possible interpretation I can think of is either incoherent or malicious.

It is often difficult to get what people are trying to convey in a typed message.

To be clear, I'm not anti-asic. I'm not anti-greed. I'm not anti-elitism. I aim to be a socialist but living in a capitalist world requires me to make money to survive. Money, greed and elitism are a fact of life in a capitalist society. Sometimes pointing out the obvious makes it appear as if you're complaining.

The OP stated a bunch of stuff. Some of it I was agreeing with. I'm simply interested in talking about how things have changed in bitcoins short lifetime. Changes that mirror the financial systems bitcoin claims to replace.

The OP and many others  claim that bitcoin takes the power away from the elite. There was a time when this was true but it is becoming less true. The introduction of ASIC eliminates quite a lot of people from the mining scene creating an elite class of miners. The BitCoin Foundation is another example of elitism. The few people (Atlas) attempting to have a discussion about this and other issues (or non issues) are marginalized and ridiculed. Again, I'm not anti-bitcoin foundation either.

The only thing I am certainly going on-and-on about is the shut-the-fuck-up-DIAF, attitudes of people who have a dissenting opinion. Bitcoin is most often advertised in a way that suggests elitism is reduced by the ability for any schmuck to be able to be a player. It shouldn't shock anyone that it has attracted people who would be offended by marginalizing or outright elimination of those schmucks.

As for supporting PPCoin... I converted all my PPCoins to bitcoins. They're pretty much useless for anything else. IMHO All these alt currencies are bitcoin's bitch. I'll support bitcoin for as long as I can find an angle to produce the somewhat free lunch I've gotten used to. With PPcoin generating 1.85 bit coins yesterday... Fuck yes I was generating some PPCoins. I'll eat steak today I think.

In the end, bitcoin seems doomed to be something more like fiat when viewing it from an end user perspective. Some elite group of people controlling it, manipulating it, and deciding who gets to be a player with the only real advantage being that you can buy drugs online and gamble online with it. That, of course, is a completely different discussion. Would bitcoin survive elimination of these spending avenues?

If your goal is to just troll every discussion, thats cool too. We all need a hobby. (I'm also not anti-troll)

Is there some reasoning behind this? Are you operating on pure confusion, pure ignorance, or some mixture of the two?

You may think that proof-of-stake will offer a higher return on investment to rich people than it does to poor people. You are confused.
This is not the case in PPCoin or any of the alternate proposals I am familiar with (e.g. any of my own, or Colbee's "proof of activity" )

Alternatively, you may think that the return on investment will be equal for rich people and poor people under proof-of-stake just like under proof-of-work. Since rich people have more capital and can invest more, they will get richer. However, the wealth distribution is not affected simply because the rich save more in absolute terms than the poor. Instead, the wealth distribution changes when the rich save a larger proportion of their income than the poor. The wealth distribution depends on the savings rate for each group, not the absolute amount saved.

If the savings rate is the same for both rich and poor, then there will be no change in the wealth distribution over time.
If the savings rate is higher for the rich than the poor, than the wealth distribution will become more and more unequal.
If the savings rate is lower for the rich than the poor, than the wealth distribution will become more and more equal.

I don't see why proof-of-stake would affect savings rates. Could you explain why you think this is the case?

Why are you spreading FUD? or does this term FUD only apply to illogical statements made about bitcoin? are illogical statements made about PPCoin also FUD?
are logical, but pessimistic statements made about bitcoin also FUD?

I'm pretty sure you can't do that. True, you can throw 128k of SRAM on a chip and compute 1 step of the innnermost Salsa20/8 hash per cycle, but that's not terribly far off what a normal CPU can manage. The problem you'll run into is this key design goal of scrypt (quoting from the scrypt paper):


What that means is that roughly speaking, no matter what clever scheme you come up with involving pipelining or only storing every Nth value or whatever else you care to try, you shouldn't be able to get a hardware implementation significantly better than if you just threw on a bunch of naive hashing cores with 128k of SRAM each that compute a single Salsa20/8 hash per clock cycle. If you think you could, your scheme almost certainly has a flaw that you haven't spotted yet.

My point is, $150 invested into ASIC is going to be just as "worthless" to plug in as $150 invested into FPGA's, or $150 invested into GPU's.  So I don't understand why ASIC's are going to make the average schmuck any less able to mine.

I just think it's hilarious that FLHippy and Benator are going on and on about how ASICs are ruining the world and de-equalizing the mining playing field when that simply isn't true at all.  Anyone could invest in ASICs, just the same as anyone could invest in FPGA's or GPU's.  And just like FPGA's and GPU's, the higher the investment, the higher the revenue (duh!).  Anyone who expects the world to work any differently than that under any circumstances is deluding themselves.

And where/how does "greed" and "elitism" come into play?  Just because people are trying to generate extra income doesn't mean they are greedy or elitist.

Oh, and the kicker:  FLHippy mentions PPCoin, which just so happens to have the focus and hope of turning towards proof of stake in the future.  If there's any system that works to make the rich richer, proof of stake is IT!  And somehow, FLHippy is SUPPORTING it!   

Don't be ridiculous.

No one said anything about free money.

The OP was trying to say that ASICs will further exclude "any schmuck" from being able to afford the initial investment to earn money. leading to centralization of financial power into the hands of fewer entities. This is certainly true and the progression is already well underway. Is it good? Is it bad? I don't know. I know my place in the pyramid though and it's no where near the top I'm not bitter. I got a free lunch from bitcoin for a very very long time. If/when that comes to an end, I'm well fed and happy to have been able to have been able to participate in it. Being a socialist, It will be sad to see the any schmuck aspect of bitcoin come to an end.

But I love a good drama, and the bitcoin drama level is especially high. I expect interesting drama to unfold in the final months of 2012 and into 2013.

I really can't fathom how people could think that bitcoin could stay in the "everyone can print their own money!" phase for any extended period of time AND have any value what-so-ever.  The two ideas are in direct conflict with each other.  The moment that something becomes of high enough value the people with more starting resources will always, always, always, no matter what BS you tell yourself, be able to acquire more of it than those without starting resources. Morality has nothing to do with it. It's all about Economics 101.  

This goes for gold, USD, bitcoin, litecoin, poopcoin, piratecoin, durpcoin, whatever.  

This is why litecoin is promoted only by people who are emo-mad that they didn't get enough BTC mined before the big boom. They're just hoping they can convince enough people to raise LTC value enough that they can dump and just move over to whatever BS they come up with next.  Either it's that explanation, or they are just too stupid to grasp economic principals taught in American elementary schools.  I'll let them decide.

I guess you just want free money thrown at you then?

$150? Who has $150 ASICs? You must mean in some not-so-distant future.
I don't believe that a $150 ASIC device would be worth plugging in.

Assuming we're in that future and the difficulty has risen... and assuming you don't have free electricity....

If the current $600 FPGA devices are $150, would they be worth plugging in?
There is no $150 GPU device which is worth plugging in now, never mind the future.
There is no $150 CPU which is worth plugging in.

So $150 is a large financial risk?   

I don't see the step towards ASICs as being morally questionable, myself.  It's still "any schmuck can earn" in my book when there's $150 ASICs available.

I agree with this. Technology speeds everything up, even the stages of greed and elitism. Bitcoin has very much gone from a moral ground of "any schmuck can earn!" to "You need a week's salary of an investment to earn." to "Only those with the ability to take a large financial risk can earn"

That said, morality goes out the window when there is money involved. It will be interesting to see if there is a morality shift to alternate currencies and equally interesting to try to determine if it's a morality shift or a financial shift. There is a lot of money invested in hardware which WILL work with those alternate currencies. For the past couple of days, PPCOIN is running around 175% more profitable to mine than BTC so perhaps it has already begun.

Agree cost-wise they hash less. But on all other fronts FPGA hash more than a GPU. Per measure of a) energy b) temperature c) size/volume