No it won't its like taking a step everyone will eventually be on the step.
Way to go. Bringing up a thread that's been dead for 2 years with that pointless reply.
Learn to read the dates on posts before adding to the thread. 
Topic: Will ASIC mining destroy Bitcoin? (Read 43104 times)
Way to go. Bringing up a thread that's been dead for 2 years with that pointless reply.
Learn to read the dates on posts before adding to the thread. No it won't its like taking a step everyone will eventually be on the step.
By which time the people on the "step" would have milked it's worth dry. The gold analogy given above is pretty accurate though.
No it won't its like taking a step everyone will eventually be on the step.
Sorry for resurrecting the topic or beating dead horse, but I wanted to share my opinion today when ASICS are already out there and much much more powerful ones are now on the pre-order.
I believe that coin mining is almost comparable to gold mining. When bitcoin started it was like a Klondike gold rush. A lot of lucky people who got to the river first got rich similar to a lot of bitcoin miners who mined thousands of btcs when they had a chance. Then the news got out a lot more miners jumped in for the riches and difficulty of finding any gold on the river or mine any bitcoin drastically increased. People started to bring heavy equipment to dig the gold out from deeper nodes and bitcoin miners started developing equipment to mine at more hashes per second.
In the end the gold rush ended when supply was almost exhausted and only people with the most expensive equipment could make some kind of a profit. Same happened to bitcoin. Mining btc today with anything but hundreds or thousands of GH/s is pointless. And difficulty increases every day. Unlike the real world there are different kinds of cryptocurrencies, the problem here is that BTC will be a foundation of this virtual gold mining for many years still and will be considered as the most solid cryptocurrency and considered as a trade value.
With more powerful ASICs being released on quarterly basis mining BTC will become pretty much impossible unless you have something like 2TH/s miner and then not long after that even those miners will struggle to mine any btc. Thats why there are more coins out there to mine now, but will these coins be ever valuable as BTC? Will gold be equal to silver, or silver to bronze? Unlikely. Even if you are able to mine 1000$ a day in Dogecoins because everything is based on BTC value and because you can't directly sell new type of coins your 'fortune' will pretty much be only 'virtual' and possible never realize itself into a real world money unless the cryptocurrency trade will pick up and people will be able to trade any coin towards bitcoin.
Will ASICs destroy bitcoin? No, it will only make BTC value stronger and higher. But less and less people will be able to mine btc unless they have very powerful ASIC miners and value of other coins will increase because of that. Cryptocurrency mining though is quite niche 'adventure'. Its more of an experience and a "game" if you wish than the actual business so it will never be as popular as gambling in Las Vegas for example. BTC is being acknowledged as possible currency in the world today and in time we may even be able to buy things on Amazon for BTC, but when this happens I bet that it will be VERY difficult and will take forever to 'mine' btc or obtain it for free. It may be legalized as a currency for transactions online but this I bet will lead to conditions put on miners that will limit them in some way.
So BTC will be there but similar to mining gold today you'll have to be either very lucky or will have to own a farm of rigs that will mine BTC 24/7 at hundreds of Terahashes per second to make some profit. And when 'gold mine' runs empty people will have to look for other coins to mine but they may never be as profitable as BTC if this coin will be kept as a base trade unit.
I believe that coin mining is almost comparable to gold mining. When bitcoin started it was like a Klondike gold rush. A lot of lucky people who got to the river first got rich similar to a lot of bitcoin miners who mined thousands of btcs when they had a chance. Then the news got out a lot more miners jumped in for the riches and difficulty of finding any gold on the river or mine any bitcoin drastically increased. People started to bring heavy equipment to dig the gold out from deeper nodes and bitcoin miners started developing equipment to mine at more hashes per second.
In the end the gold rush ended when supply was almost exhausted and only people with the most expensive equipment could make some kind of a profit. Same happened to bitcoin. Mining btc today with anything but hundreds or thousands of GH/s is pointless. And difficulty increases every day. Unlike the real world there are different kinds of cryptocurrencies, the problem here is that BTC will be a foundation of this virtual gold mining for many years still and will be considered as the most solid cryptocurrency and considered as a trade value.
With more powerful ASICs being released on quarterly basis mining BTC will become pretty much impossible unless you have something like 2TH/s miner and then not long after that even those miners will struggle to mine any btc. Thats why there are more coins out there to mine now, but will these coins be ever valuable as BTC? Will gold be equal to silver, or silver to bronze? Unlikely. Even if you are able to mine 1000$ a day in Dogecoins because everything is based on BTC value and because you can't directly sell new type of coins your 'fortune' will pretty much be only 'virtual' and possible never realize itself into a real world money unless the cryptocurrency trade will pick up and people will be able to trade any coin towards bitcoin.
Will ASICs destroy bitcoin? No, it will only make BTC value stronger and higher. But less and less people will be able to mine btc unless they have very powerful ASIC miners and value of other coins will increase because of that. Cryptocurrency mining though is quite niche 'adventure'. Its more of an experience and a "game" if you wish than the actual business so it will never be as popular as gambling in Las Vegas for example. BTC is being acknowledged as possible currency in the world today and in time we may even be able to buy things on Amazon for BTC, but when this happens I bet that it will be VERY difficult and will take forever to 'mine' btc or obtain it for free. It may be legalized as a currency for transactions online but this I bet will lead to conditions put on miners that will limit them in some way.
So BTC will be there but similar to mining gold today you'll have to be either very lucky or will have to own a farm of rigs that will mine BTC 24/7 at hundreds of Terahashes per second to make some profit. And when 'gold mine' runs empty people will have to look for other coins to mine but they may never be as profitable as BTC if this coin will be kept as a base trade unit.
I don't know anyone besides BFL who is making a legitimate effort towards developing a Bitcoin mining ASIC then. Anyone else know of someone?
friedcat with Block Erupter is raising funds and is working on analog design, last I heard. There is also OpenBitASIC, but I haven't heard anything from them recently. Jason hasn't been on the forum for a while. 
The real question for miners is - Do you spend your money on these machines or do you simply buy the BTC on an exchange. Historically, are you not better off just buying BTC off MtGox, especially if you believe difficulty will dramatically increase after the first x-number of units are delivered and turned on?
+1,
after some analysis and some risk models done with help of professionals back in May 2012 I have suggested to some people I've been in touch with regarding potential ASIC mining project to forget about mining and simply buy BTC instead. After that our ASIC project was scrapped. It was back when BTC was valued at 5$.
My opinion is still the same. BTC represent better risk/reward than mining, provided that one keep em secure in own wallet, of course.
For what it worth,
Vladimir "The Miner".
I don't know anyone besides BFL who is making a legitimate effort towards developing a Bitcoin mining ASIC then. Anyone else know of someone?
I perhaps should clarify that we never actually tried to build our own ASIC's (I would not know where to start). The idea was to rise funds and set up a mining company that would in turn finance one or more ASIC development teams and we would get in return preferential terms, long term discounts, distribution rights, equity shares etc in those chipmakers. However, negotiations took too long, the potential ASIC development partners did no give us what we wanted, there were too many of those potential ASIC teams. In the end we did not like risk/reward and withdrew from the marketplace.
That is the story of it. Thankfully, nobody on our side got hurt financially, except maybe me (some professional fees and time invested and it is all negligible anyway).
The real question for miners is - Do you spend your money on these machines or do you simply buy the BTC on an exchange. Historically, are you not better off just buying BTC off MtGox, especially if you believe difficulty will dramatically increase after the first x-number of units are delivered and turned on?
+1,
after some analysis and some risk models done with help of professionals back in May 2012 I have suggested to some people I've been in touch with regarding potential ASIC mining project to forget about mining and simply buy BTC instead. After that our ASIC project was scrapped. It was back when BTC was valued at 5$.
My opinion is still the same. BTC represent better risk/reward than mining, provided that one keep em secure in own wallet, of course.
For what it worth,
Vladimir "The Miner".
I don't know anyone besides BFL who is making a legitimate effort towards developing a Bitcoin mining ASIC then. Anyone else know of someone?
The real question for miners is - Do you spend your money on these machines or do you simply buy the BTC on an exchange. Historically, are you not better off just buying BTC off MtGox, especially if you believe difficulty will dramatically increase after the first x-number of units are delivered and turned on?
+1,
after some analysis and some risk models done with help of professionals back in May 2012 I have suggested to some people I've been in touch with regarding potential ASIC mining project to forget about mining and simply buy BTC instead. After that our ASIC project was scrapped. It was back when BTC was valued at 5$.
My opinion is still the same. BTC represent better risk/reward than mining, provided that one keep em secure in own wallet, of course.
For what it worth,
Vladimir "The Miner".
The real question for miners is - Do you spend your money on these machines or do you simply buy the BTC on an exchange. Historically, are you not better off just buying BTC off MtGox, especially if you believe difficulty will dramatically increase after the first x-number of units are delivered and turned on?
So someone will all of that mining power would do a 51% ATTACK and destroy Bitcoin rather than use it to solo mine all the time and get loads of cash and then support the currency? I want to see Bitcoin to very well. This planet needs a wordwide currency and is not dependent on what governments do with their money, like for instance printing loads of it devaluing their own currency.
This can't happen To Bitcoin as only so many can be mined and created.
This can't happen To Bitcoin as only so many can be mined and created.
ASIC mining will make it much, much tougher for an entity to borrow a bunch of computing power to attack bitcoin.
For instance, lets suppose BFL sells just $5 million dollars worth of their "coffee warmers". (a highly conservative number that'd probably leave them bankrupt after they paid for the ASIC development costs) That's about 33 thousand coffee warmers, or 234TH/sec. Suppose the attacker decided to requisition a whole bunch of computers to attack Bitcoin, for instance by asking Amazon or Google "nicely" One 4-way Opteron CPU can do about 115MH/s, so for your 51% attack you'll need about 1 million CPU's. If you're renting from Amazon, that's costing you something like a million dollars an hour, assuming you could even get them to let you rent that much computing power. The capital cost of all that computing power is also in the range of hundreds of millions of dollars, heck, easily a billion dollars with server farm overhead.
Finding a whole bunch of GPU's is actually rather tough, as most GPU farms are for scientific computing and use floating-point optimized GPU's that aren't very good at computing hashes.
A final possibility is borrowing an FPGA farm. We could make the rough assumption that the value of the farm's FPGAs will have the same $/Hash ratio as BFL's currently shipping product. So that's 117TH/sec / 0.8GHash/Single * $600/Single = $87.7 Million dollars worth of FPGAs. Intel might have that kind of FPGA farm available - they're used for chip verification - but again, renting it won't be cheap. Also, it looks like BFL is getting it's FPGAs at pretty cheap prices - a $600 single has $2000 worth of FPGAs in it - so with wholesale discounts we still might need to triple or quadruple that $87 million.
With ASIC mining, the cheapest way to computationally attack Bitcoin is probably by doing a run of your own ASICs, and it's not something you can do quickly. All that effort and money just so you can find out the myriad ways that the devs can stop 51% attacks using techniques possible now that Bitcoin is widely established.
For instance, lets suppose the NSA decides to attack Bitcoin. They could probably round up the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of computing power to make it happen, although it'd be a big hit to their black budget. Chances are within a few hours to days the devs will respond with something like a "coin-age" rule and ask everyone to upgrade. Now blocks get rejected, and nodes blacklisted, if they try to pass blocks into the network that don't meet coin age requirements. Transactions start flowing again, although the price on Mt. Gox has dropped severely, lets say 50%. At the same time the "known-legit" mining pools are also taking steps to protect their investment, by temporarily centralizing a bit, and blocking connections to nodes that aren't on a whitelist; the "most-difficult-block-wins" rule has been temporarily suspended. Note that at this point it's still not possible for anyone to steal coins, and not much more possible to do double spends.
Now, one thing the NSA could do is buy a bunch of coins so their blocks get accepted again. The problem is, now they're basically giving people a way to get out of Bitcoin, and boosting the price on the exchanges, restoring confidence. Exactly what they don't want! If they do nothing, they're still burning at least hundreds of thousands of dollars an hour, while the network figures out ways to mitigate the damage.
Honestly, ordering some assassinations on the guys running major exchanges sounds a lot cheaper...
Why wouldn't someone trying to 51 the network just approach BFL? They'd have ready-to-use chips and it would significantly cheaper for them to produce them than the entity doing it themselves.For instance, lets suppose BFL sells just $5 million dollars worth of their "coffee warmers". (a highly conservative number that'd probably leave them bankrupt after they paid for the ASIC development costs) That's about 33 thousand coffee warmers, or 234TH/sec. Suppose the attacker decided to requisition a whole bunch of computers to attack Bitcoin, for instance by asking Amazon or Google "nicely" One 4-way Opteron CPU can do about 115MH/s, so for your 51% attack you'll need about 1 million CPU's. If you're renting from Amazon, that's costing you something like a million dollars an hour, assuming you could even get them to let you rent that much computing power. The capital cost of all that computing power is also in the range of hundreds of millions of dollars, heck, easily a billion dollars with server farm overhead.
Finding a whole bunch of GPU's is actually rather tough, as most GPU farms are for scientific computing and use floating-point optimized GPU's that aren't very good at computing hashes.
A final possibility is borrowing an FPGA farm. We could make the rough assumption that the value of the farm's FPGAs will have the same $/Hash ratio as BFL's currently shipping product. So that's 117TH/sec / 0.8GHash/Single * $600/Single = $87.7 Million dollars worth of FPGAs. Intel might have that kind of FPGA farm available - they're used for chip verification - but again, renting it won't be cheap. Also, it looks like BFL is getting it's FPGAs at pretty cheap prices - a $600 single has $2000 worth of FPGAs in it - so with wholesale discounts we still might need to triple or quadruple that $87 million.
With ASIC mining, the cheapest way to computationally attack Bitcoin is probably by doing a run of your own ASICs, and it's not something you can do quickly. All that effort and money just so you can find out the myriad ways that the devs can stop 51% attacks using techniques possible now that Bitcoin is widely established.
For instance, lets suppose the NSA decides to attack Bitcoin. They could probably round up the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of computing power to make it happen, although it'd be a big hit to their black budget. Chances are within a few hours to days the devs will respond with something like a "coin-age" rule and ask everyone to upgrade. Now blocks get rejected, and nodes blacklisted, if they try to pass blocks into the network that don't meet coin age requirements. Transactions start flowing again, although the price on Mt. Gox has dropped severely, lets say 50%. At the same time the "known-legit" mining pools are also taking steps to protect their investment, by temporarily centralizing a bit, and blocking connections to nodes that aren't on a whitelist; the "most-difficult-block-wins" rule has been temporarily suspended. Note that at this point it's still not possible for anyone to steal coins, and not much more possible to do double spends.
Now, one thing the NSA could do is buy a bunch of coins so their blocks get accepted again. The problem is, now they're basically giving people a way to get out of Bitcoin, and boosting the price on the exchanges, restoring confidence. Exactly what they don't want! If they do nothing, they're still burning at least hundreds of thousands of dollars an hour, while the network figures out ways to mitigate the damage.
Honestly, ordering some assassinations on the guys running major exchanges sounds a lot cheaper...
As far as I can see, bitcoin security is proportional to market capitalization. The more bitcoins are worth the larger the income for miners will be and, thus, more miners will exist. The marginal cost of ASICs is tiny though. So if some entity were to develop their own ASIC, I'm not sure if it would matter that they'd have to produce 100,000 chips instead of 10,000.
Quote
Honestly, ordering some assassinations on the guys running major exchanges sounds a lot cheaper...
And I realize our developers being assassinated is not realistic, but then again I really really really don't want them all on the same plane on any business trips... EDIT: Also, bike helmets are now mandatory for the devs.
+1 lol
ASIC mining will make it much, much tougher for an entity to borrow a bunch of computing power to attack bitcoin.
For instance, lets suppose BFL sells just $5 million dollars worth of their "coffee warmers". (a highly conservative number that'd probably leave them bankrupt after they paid for the ASIC development costs) That's about 33 thousand coffee warmers, or 234TH/sec. Suppose the attacker decided to requisition a whole bunch of computers to attack Bitcoin, for instance by asking Amazon or Google "nicely" One 4-way Opteron CPU can do about 115MH/s, so for your 51% attack you'll need about 1 million CPU's. If you're renting from Amazon, that's costing you something like a million dollars an hour, assuming you could even get them to let you rent that much computing power. The capital cost of all that computing power is also in the range of hundreds of millions of dollars, heck, easily a billion dollars with server farm overhead.
Finding a whole bunch of GPU's is actually rather tough, as most GPU farms are for scientific computing and use floating-point optimized GPU's that aren't very good at computing hashes.
A final possibility is borrowing an FPGA farm. We could make the rough assumption that the value of the farm's FPGAs will have the same $/Hash ratio as BFL's currently shipping product. So that's 117TH/sec / 0.8GHash/Single * $600/Single = $87.7 Million dollars worth of FPGAs. Intel might have that kind of FPGA farm available - they're used for chip verification - but again, renting it won't be cheap. Also, it looks like BFL is getting it's FPGAs at pretty cheap prices - a $600 single has $2000 worth of FPGAs in it - so with wholesale discounts we still might need to triple or quadruple that $87 million.
With ASIC mining, the cheapest way to computationally attack Bitcoin is probably by doing a run of your own ASICs, and it's not something you can do quickly. All that effort and money just so you can find out the myriad ways that the devs can stop 51% attacks using techniques possible now that Bitcoin is widely established.
For instance, lets suppose the NSA decides to attack Bitcoin. They could probably round up the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of computing power to make it happen, although it'd be a big hit to their black budget. Chances are within a few hours to days the devs will respond with something like a "coin-age" rule and ask everyone to upgrade. Now blocks get rejected, and nodes blacklisted, if they try to pass blocks into the network that don't meet coin age requirements. Transactions start flowing again, although the price on Mt. Gox has dropped severely, lets say 50%. At the same time the "known-legit" mining pools are also taking steps to protect their investment, by temporarily centralizing a bit, and blocking connections to nodes that aren't on a whitelist; the "most-difficult-block-wins" rule has been temporarily suspended. Note that at this point it's still not possible for anyone to steal coins, and not much more possible to do double spends.
Now, one thing the NSA could do is buy a bunch of coins so their blocks get accepted again. The problem is, now they're basically giving people a way to get out of Bitcoin, and boosting the price on the exchanges, restoring confidence. Exactly what they don't want! If they do nothing, they're still burning at least hundreds of thousands of dollars an hour, while the network figures out ways to mitigate the damage.
Honestly, ordering some assassinations on the guys running major exchanges sounds a lot cheaper...
Why wouldn't someone trying to 51 the network just approach BFL? They'd have ready-to-use chips and it would significantly cheaper for them to produce them than the entity doing it themselves.For instance, lets suppose BFL sells just $5 million dollars worth of their "coffee warmers". (a highly conservative number that'd probably leave them bankrupt after they paid for the ASIC development costs) That's about 33 thousand coffee warmers, or 234TH/sec. Suppose the attacker decided to requisition a whole bunch of computers to attack Bitcoin, for instance by asking Amazon or Google "nicely" One 4-way Opteron CPU can do about 115MH/s, so for your 51% attack you'll need about 1 million CPU's. If you're renting from Amazon, that's costing you something like a million dollars an hour, assuming you could even get them to let you rent that much computing power. The capital cost of all that computing power is also in the range of hundreds of millions of dollars, heck, easily a billion dollars with server farm overhead.
Finding a whole bunch of GPU's is actually rather tough, as most GPU farms are for scientific computing and use floating-point optimized GPU's that aren't very good at computing hashes.
A final possibility is borrowing an FPGA farm. We could make the rough assumption that the value of the farm's FPGAs will have the same $/Hash ratio as BFL's currently shipping product. So that's 117TH/sec / 0.8GHash/Single * $600/Single = $87.7 Million dollars worth of FPGAs. Intel might have that kind of FPGA farm available - they're used for chip verification - but again, renting it won't be cheap. Also, it looks like BFL is getting it's FPGAs at pretty cheap prices - a $600 single has $2000 worth of FPGAs in it - so with wholesale discounts we still might need to triple or quadruple that $87 million.
With ASIC mining, the cheapest way to computationally attack Bitcoin is probably by doing a run of your own ASICs, and it's not something you can do quickly. All that effort and money just so you can find out the myriad ways that the devs can stop 51% attacks using techniques possible now that Bitcoin is widely established.
For instance, lets suppose the NSA decides to attack Bitcoin. They could probably round up the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of computing power to make it happen, although it'd be a big hit to their black budget. Chances are within a few hours to days the devs will respond with something like a "coin-age" rule and ask everyone to upgrade. Now blocks get rejected, and nodes blacklisted, if they try to pass blocks into the network that don't meet coin age requirements. Transactions start flowing again, although the price on Mt. Gox has dropped severely, lets say 50%. At the same time the "known-legit" mining pools are also taking steps to protect their investment, by temporarily centralizing a bit, and blocking connections to nodes that aren't on a whitelist; the "most-difficult-block-wins" rule has been temporarily suspended. Note that at this point it's still not possible for anyone to steal coins, and not much more possible to do double spends.
Now, one thing the NSA could do is buy a bunch of coins so their blocks get accepted again. The problem is, now they're basically giving people a way to get out of Bitcoin, and boosting the price on the exchanges, restoring confidence. Exactly what they don't want! If they do nothing, they're still burning at least hundreds of thousands of dollars an hour, while the network figures out ways to mitigate the damage.
Honestly, ordering some assassinations on the guys running major exchanges sounds a lot cheaper...
As far as I can see, bitcoin security is proportional to market capitalization. The more bitcoins are worth the larger the income for miners will be and, thus, more miners will exist. The marginal cost of ASICs is tiny though. So if some entity were to develop their own ASIC, I'm not sure if it would matter that they'd have to produce 100,000 chips instead of 10,000.
Quote
Honestly, ordering some assassinations on the guys running major exchanges sounds a lot cheaper...
And I realize our developers being assassinated is not realistic, but then again I really really really don't want them all on the same plane on any business trips... EDIT: Also, bike helmets are now mandatory for the devs.
Moores law man (kinda). At some point ASIC will become the "new" GPU and it will have to be upgraded or completely changed at some point. Will it destroy bitcoin? That was just a title to entice readers. It will only strengthen competition for miners which can only be good right?
And what can be wrong with strengthening the power of the miners? It will only make it more difficult for a 51% attack.
you don't use ASICs for gamingAnd what can be wrong with strengthening the power of the miners? It will only make it more difficult for a 51% attack.
how will it strengthen competition for miners? strengthen competition amongst the 2% that are left?
who cares about a 51% attack when nobody cares about bitcoins anymore?
surely i'm not the only one that solely became interested because I could use my existing equipment to procure my 'own' bitcoins
i wouldn't have thought twice about it had it required some POS that was useless otherwise.
ed: (and why in the hell would more people have ASICs than GPUs, making a "51% attack" less likely? since when does total hash power figure in here, rather than # of players?)
do you think grocery stores leave out those free samples to feed the starving ppls?
what if you had to pay $100 to get a key to gain access to these (not so) free little pieces of diced cheese and what not? would you ever sample the product?
i doubt it
I'm fine with asics as long as there's a reasonable low priced option to spread the mining power among more people (lot's of small miners is safer than a few big miners), and seeing as that 150$ device is priced competitively against it's higher powered siblings things look ok.
Moores law man (kinda). At some point ASIC will become the "new" GPU and it will have to be upgraded or completely changed at some point. Will it destroy bitcoin? That was just a title to entice readers. It will only strengthen competition for miners which can only be good right?
And what can be wrong with strengthening the power of the miners? It will only make it more difficult for a 51% attack.
you don't use ASICs for gamingAnd what can be wrong with strengthening the power of the miners? It will only make it more difficult for a 51% attack.
how will it strengthen competition for miners? strengthen competition amongst the 2% that are left?
who cares about a 51% attack when nobody cares about bitcoins anymore?
surely i'm not the only one that solely became interested because I could use my existing equipment to procure my 'own' bitcoins
i wouldn't have thought twice about it had it required some POS that was useless otherwise.
ed: (and why in the hell would more people have ASICs than GPUs, making a "51% attack" less likely? since when does total hash power figure in here, rather than # of players?)
do you think grocery stores leave out those free samples to feed the starving ppls?
what if you had to pay $100 to get a key to gain access to these (not so) free little pieces of diced cheese and what not? would you ever sample the product?
i doubt it
Quote
Perhaps after eliminating all the illegal botnets and miners who are just mining for "free money" with no real interest, there might just be 2% of total miners now - but that's still better than the status quo. Total hash power has always been the important factor of Bitcoin mining, and it was designed to be intentionally highly competitive (and therefore just barely profitable).
your 1st sentence, i don't find any of it based in actual reality
2nd sentence, yes, total hash power matters to an extent. with 1/100th as many people mining, a "51% attack" becomes more likely, rather than less likely, however
Moores law man (kinda). At some point ASIC will become the "new" GPU and it will have to be upgraded or completely changed at some point. Will it destroy bitcoin? That was just a title to entice readers. It will only strengthen competition for miners which can only be good right?
And what can be wrong with strengthening the power of the miners? It will only make it more difficult for a 51% attack.
you don't use ASICs for gamingAnd what can be wrong with strengthening the power of the miners? It will only make it more difficult for a 51% attack.
how will it strengthen competition for miners? strengthen competition amongst the 2% that are left?
who cares about a 51% attack when nobody cares about bitcoins anymore?
surely i'm not the only one that solely became interested because I could use my existing equipment to procure my 'own' bitcoins
i wouldn't have thought twice about it had it required some POS that was useless otherwise.
ed: (and why in the hell would more people have ASICs than GPUs, making a "51% attack" less likely? since when does total hash power figure in here, rather than # of players?)
Moores law man (kinda). At some point ASIC will become the "new" GPU and it will have to be upgraded or completely changed at some point. Will it destroy bitcoin? That was just a title to entice readers. It will only strengthen competition for miners which can only be good right?
And what can be wrong with strengthening the power of the miners? It will only make it more difficult for a 51% attack.
you don't use ASICs for gamingAnd what can be wrong with strengthening the power of the miners? It will only make it more difficult for a 51% attack.
how will it strengthen competition for miners? strengthen competition amongst the 2% that are left?
who cares about a 51% attack when nobody cares about bitcoins anymore?
surely i'm not the only one that solely became interested because I could use my existing equipment to procure my 'own' bitcoins
i wouldn't have thought twice about it had it required some POS that was useless otherwise.
ed: (and why in the hell would more people have ASICs than GPUs, making a "51% attack" less likely? since when does total hash power figure in here, rather than # of players?)
Perhaps after eliminating all the illegal botnets and miners who are just mining for "free money" with no real interest, there might just be 2% of total miners now - but that's still better than the status quo. Total hash power has always been the important factor of Bitcoin mining, and it was designed to be intentionally highly competitive (and therefore just barely profitable).
If you don't care about Bitcoin, that's another problem entirely. Perhaps you should look into reasons Bitcoin is better than conventional currency.
Moores law man (kinda). At some point ASIC will become the "new" GPU and it will have to be upgraded or completely changed at some point. Will it destroy bitcoin? That was just a title to entice readers. It will only strengthen competition for miners which can only be good right?
And what can be wrong with strengthening the power of the miners? It will only make it more difficult for a 51% attack.
you don't use ASICs for gamingAnd what can be wrong with strengthening the power of the miners? It will only make it more difficult for a 51% attack.
how will it strengthen competition for miners? strengthen competition amongst the 2% that are left?
who cares about a 51% attack when nobody cares about bitcoins anymore?
surely i'm not the only one that solely became interested because I could use my existing equipment to procure my 'own' bitcoins
i wouldn't have thought twice about it had it required some POS that was useless otherwise.
ed: (and why in the hell would more people have ASICs than GPUs, making a "51% attack" less likely? since when does total hash power figure in here, rather than # of players?)
Moores law man (kinda). At some point ASIC will become the "new" GPU and it will have to be upgraded or completely changed at some point. Will it destroy bitcoin? That was just a title to entice readers. It will only strengthen competition for miners which can only be good right?
And what can be wrong with strengthening the power of the miners? It will only make it more difficult for a 51% attack.
Correct, and I don't know why other users find it so hard to figure this out. And what can be wrong with strengthening the power of the miners? It will only make it more difficult for a 51% attack.
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