Topic: Why you will never get an ASIC miner, for real. (Read 6030 times)

They said so .... that doesn't imply they did, or shiped a shoe

Oh hai guys!

An Avalon ASIC has shipped, ROFL.

I guess I was wrong.

 

CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!

Let's say it was possible, then there should be a change in what is used to secure technology. 

Technology is not so tied to an implementation that it cannot change.

One example progression:
SSL
SSLv2
SSLv3
TLS

Look at the number of ciphers . key lengths and the such that make up the collection of various SSL implementations.

Then look at Rainbow tables and whats happening there with password cracking.  As the tables grow the methods used to store passwords change. 

The industry will adapt to the evolving threats and live on.

Just to be clear though, as stated earlier, SHA is only a hash and part of an encryption system, not encryption by itself.

Another thought, given that there was a couple million dollars put into the existing ASIC effort, and part of that is profit for the companies creating ASIC, how difficult would it be for large criminal organization or a state entity, spend that sort of money to build it themselves, it is was possible to use it to perform a real attack. 

Given BTC @ $16.83 that's just my 0.001188 BTC

Faggot conspiracy theorist OP ran away.

Is that a spare they have under the front hood? Hilarious... Almost as hilarious as the dude who started this thread.

Well no.  Lets ignore that SHA-256 is a hash not encryption and thus with infinite amount of time and infinite amount of energy you can't "decrypt" SHA-256.

Still 256 but keys are sufficiently large that even at the thermodynamic limit (i.e. a theoretically perfect computer) there is insufficient energy and matter in our solar system (i.e. kill everything and convert the entire solar system into a super computer which uses the complete output of our star until it dies) to even .... COUNT to 256 bit, much less perform any complex calculations.  It is possible that encrypting algorithms will be compromised due to undiscovered flaws which allow attackers to perform attacks at faster than brute force but 256 bit keys will not be brute forced.

For information on the energy requirements (using an as on yet not invented perfect computer) required to count to 2^256 ...

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/09/the_doghouse_cr.html

proof? inb4 "the lack of proof proves the conspiracy!" logic

Really cool read, thanks for the link. However, this is not quite the same as what I proposed. I was talking about building ASICs for security that we'll use in the future, not what security we're using now, or what was used in the past. You could, for instance, figure out what key bit length the government is currently using, double it, and build a massive ASIC far for that. After a few years, when the government upgrades their encryption (hopefully not to a new algorithm, just a new key length), you'll turn your machines on and be cranking away at intercepted messages or passwords. So, while they think they're getting higher security (which they are), they're also stepping into the hands of someone with deep pockets who's ready to break that security. That's a partially dangerous situation for any government.

I felt superior until u pointed this out ....I hold u responsible for me feeling stupid

You've misunderstood pretty much everything.

First, you cannot "decrypt" a hash.  Go read a cryptography primer.

You are wrong Nobody has given you a full technical response, so here is one:

- First of all SHA256 is hashing, not encryption
- Mining ASICs can only do 1 thing (find x such as SHA256(SHA256(x)) has zeros in the low 32 bits). They cannot be used for general attacks (eg. given y, find x such as SHA256(x) = y).
- There is no point in reverse engineering them: their design is simple, cryptographers can easily design some to suit their exact problem, and have already done so in the past: http://rijndael.ece.vt.edu/sha3/publications/DATE2012SHA3.pdf
- Cryptographers designed SHA256 to resist bruteforce attacks (by ASICs or any fast hardware) thanks to the sheer size of the output hash and conservative design. For example, finding a SHA256 pre-image takes on average 2^256 calls to the compression function. ASICs only bring a relatively tiny performance improvement over FPGAs of at most ~50x (per mm² of die area). 50x is huge for Bitcoin, but tiny cryptographically speaking. So a pre-image attack on ASIC would be equivalent to a 2^250 pre-image attack on FPGA. Big deal. No one cares. This is not a world-changing event.

Bottom line: cryptographers already planned for fast SHA256 hardware, this hardware already exists, and this hardware is not constantly breaking the world.

I was sure something existed somewhere. Thanks for the link!

Hey! He only wished (3 times in all) for someone to tell him that he's wrong, not that he's some kind of intelligence-reducing contagious meme producer. Give away insults like that for free and we'll all be out of a job.

Damn.

Ltcfaucet, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent post were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone on this forum is now dumber for having read it. May God have mercy on your soul.

+1

If you succeed to decrypt SHA you would have invented infinite data compression.

I'm not quite sure how processing SHA256 hashes using ASICs is "impossible" or that 'they' would never allow it.  I suspect a basic lack of understanding of the underlying technologies by the OP.

Regarding building ASICs specifically for the purposes of decryption, its already been done a very long time ago.  Here is one example I can think of:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker

The principal designer was Paul Kocher, president of Cryptography Research. Advanced Wireless Technologies built 1856 custom ASIC DES chips (called Deep Crack or AWT-4500), housed on 29 circuit boards of 64 chips each.

Let's put bitcoin aside, and focus completely on security here, since you've made that a serious concern. Here's the thing with security, it's exponentially more difficult to break, for every small difficulty increase in encrypting. This means it'll always be much easier to increase difficulty, than it will to break the harder difficulty. As technology advances and we get fast machines to break 256  bit encryption, 512 comes out, and after some time, we can then break 512, but it's already been upgraded to 1024, and so on.

Let's look at some numbers just to check this out:
http://www.cryptopp.com/benchmarks.html

Using the first algorithm type, let's assume our arbitrary encryption uses 17.2 cycles per byte of the key, for some arbitrary length data (making a lot of assumptions, but they're made fairly).
So, our 8-bit cypher takes 17.2 CPU cycles to encrypt. With 8-bit security, there are 256 possible outcomes (2^8). All outcomes can be found in 4403.2 cycles (256*17.2). I'm going to go crazy here and assume absolutely no collisions for these examples. In reality, however, you may need to encrypt/hash 500+ different items to cover all 256 possibilities, or you may never find all 256, but for these examples, we'll assume no collisions, and everything plays nice.

Now, let's assume we get some fancy new computers available, and now we need to upgrade our security. Let's use 16-bit encryption. That'll take 34.4 cycles to encrypt (2*17.2), giving us 65536 combinations possible. That'll take 1.127 million cycles to calculate all possible values. With a 3GHz processor (3 billion cycles per second), you're still talking about 1/1000 of a second to calculate all possible values.

Let's up our security to 24-bit. Encryption = 51.6 cycles. 16.8m possibilities. 288m cycles for all possibilities (1/30th of a second).

32-bit security. Encrypt = 68.8 cycles. 4.3 billion possibilities. 73.9 billion cycles for all combinations. 24.62 seconds.

40-bit security. Encrypt = 86 cycles. 1.1 trillion possibilities. 18.9 trillion cycles for all combinations. 1 hour, 45 minutes.

48-bit security. Encrypt = 103.2 cycles. 281 trillion possibilities. 4.84 quadrillion cycles for all possibilities. 18 days, 16 hours.

So you see, while it take so incredibly little time to encrypt, the decryption time grows exponentially larger with each little bit of security you add. So, would it be possible for someone to create some ASICs that are designed to break security in use today? Sure, but as soon as that was figured out, everyone would just increase what security strength they use, and all the ASICs become completely useless then. It would be interesting if someone started working on ASICs for 2048 bit encryption of some popular types, then waited for everyone to upgrade (creating rainbow tables or whatever in the meantime), then they could attack several companies at a single time before everyone noes up to 4096. It'd be a bit surprising to jump up in security, only to find it less secure than what everyone was just on.

You ever see the Top Gear when they compared a Rolls Royce to a Mercedes to a "Bentley" ? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyH-351Z_-0&t=1m17s Give it like a minute or so.

You are an idiot....
1. You are a dyed in the wool troll... trolls have no understanding of technology.
2. You cannot 'decrypt a hash' , it would be like trying to see the contents of a black hole.
3. An ASIC is just that.... APPLICATION SPECIFIC INTEGRATED CIRCUIT.... it would be like buying a Skoda and thinking that putting a new set of windscreen wipers in it will make it a Rolls Royce.

I'm beginning to think you're right, there is always some reason for shipment delay every month, and what keeps you in there is the threat of losing your place in the pre-order queue.

I could take pre-order money and buy mountains of FPGAs with it.

When eventually the sucker I mean customer wakes up and asks for their money back I can give it to them.

Off course nobody was ripped off, they got their money back, so I got a free loan, and maybe their currency depreciated a little over time, but all that matters is they got refunded.

Arbitrage scams work best when nobody feels like a victim.

HAHHAHAHAHAHAAH That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.  You have NO idea what you're talking about.  SHA is a HASH algorithm - it's not for ENCRYPTION.  Go read something please.

SHA isn't encryption. It is a one way hash function. It obscures an input, but on the level you are arguing encryption might as well be the term you want to use.

The thing about SHA as a one way has function is that unless the math is broken by anything less than a brute force attack, it is still "intact". Yes ASICs might make this easier, but...

• As single purpose chips this are aimed at SHA-256
• Moving existing applications from SHA-256 to SHA-512 fixes this, probably (if the asics as delivered could perform either calculation instead of only one, the engineering was likely suboptimal because they probably could have squeezed out still more performance on the same die.)

You are right untill one appears doing 60gh@60watts but untill then it,s going to be an endless discussion over and over... people will try to convince u ur wrong ...its like god vs darwin

Still buying gpu,s an are making btc over and over day in day out.

I feel sorry for people who pre orderd the quick cash machines they will find out the hard way...first they thought they could make roi before halvingday hoping to get there hands on the first batches ..whaaaa
 look at the sitiuation now..  Nothing in life comes for free.. Nothing..

I do hoop for the community and the trust there will be some sort of conversion from gpu fpga to better and efficient devices.. Some day before the next halvingday
If Avalon doesn,t deliver this month with there nice words and answers it for sure can be called an SCAM

Cheerzzz...

INSERTS COIN....

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Exactly.

Estimated how much money did BFL receive in pre-orders?

You're telling me with that kind of cash on hand you can't get a piece of hardware manufactured?

Why are there other companies in the same boat? One which is now selling-out.

The U.S. Government is who is preventing ASIC I can almost guarantee you.

And as previously stated on this forum and many other places, having that ability is quite literally like having a money printer, if it existed they would never let it go!

I sure as fuck wouldn't tell anyone if I found a way to generate thousands of dollars in bitcoins per day, just being honest.

So please tell me I'm wrong, with a little emphasis.

You are more wrong. Quite.

more

Please tell me more!

You are wrong.

You will never have a commercially made ASIC miner for SHA encryption!

Until every organisation on the internet and off the internet changes the way they encrypt their information, you are out of luck.

Reason being:
This ASIC hardware could too easily be reverse engineered to decrypt SHA. And with it's small size and power consumption they could be ran almost anywhere barely undetected constantly attacking SHA at an incredible rate. Essentially these devices would put too much power into public hands.

If you are going to continue to pursue this Bitcoin mining game you better load up on FPGAs and GPUs!

Now someone tell me I am wrong.

Thanks.