Topic: Will ASIC mining destroy Bitcoin? - page 3. (Read 43026 times)

Doh! Yeah, in general that's not a safe assumption, because in theory miners drop out as profitability drops due to the new hash power, but I'm assuming a sudden attack. In that scenario you actually have to provide an equal amount of hash power to the existing network. So all my already conservative, BFL labs goes bankrupt because they don't sell enough hardware, estimates can be doubled.

As it is, the idea that miners will drop out as profitability drops is probably not all that true either now that mining profitability is mainly a function of capital costs rather than marginal electricity costs.

Thank you Gavin.  I have been waiting for a senior developer to weigh in and add to our collective perspective.


Kudos,
Dalkore

I think so, yes.

It's been brought up that if something needs to change security wise and the Devs need majority of the miners to switch; ASIC users are basically screwed out of their investment.

I don't think its likely that anything is going to happen to SHA-256 in the foreseeable future...


But here I am talking about things i hardly have any knowledge of. I know ASIC is purpose built hardware, but is the architecture the end all be all of mining? Will the next thing after ASIC simply be upgraded ASIC via die shrink and design?

But this solves the problem that bad guys could get large number of the mining CPU's GPUP's and FPGA's at whatever price.

Seriously, what if the developers decided to change the block hashing algorithm from double SHA-256 to something else (WHIRLPOOL or SHA 3 maybe)? doesn't it renders ASIC useless?

So can everyone else at that point.

Quantum miners aren't really that great for mining. We deal almost exclusively with int numbers.

Sure, but this doesn't solve the problem that a bad guy will get the mining ASIC at a much lower $ - GHash/s ratio.

Then don't buy it.

The problem is, there is no other use for a mining ASIC besides mining, so after the sales to the community goes down, BFL could only make more profit by selling more chips. What if now the evil whoever will ask them for 'The network hash rate + x%' in Chips with usual discounts?

This. Most of the whiners just fear that they wont get rich anymore with asic around. Now they can prove that they're in for the project and not only to profit. This 51% bla bla just sucks. My fpga will be paid off when asic hits the market I'm ready for the future.

I'm holding out for cheap quantum miners! 

as soon as one realises that:

1. Good for CPU  miners != Good for Bitcoin
and
2. Good for GPU  miners != Good for Bitcoin
and
3. Good for FPGA miners != Good for Bitcoin
and
4. The higher the Bitcoin nework difficulty the more secure Bitcoin network is and therefore
Migration to ASIC mining and combined Bitcoin hashing power measured in ExoHashes as opposed to present TeraHashes  = Good for Bitcoin.

So if you want to whine about ASIC's try to be honest and not bring  "good of Bitcoin" into it. Go and whine like "ohh by October my FPGA will not pay for itself, my investment went baad, gotta go to work for Wallmart again!"

If ASICs are going to be owned only by a small group of people, then it won't be good for BTC.

ASICs are a good thing for Bitcoin, it's just the evolution of mining, from generalized hardware (gpu) to specialized hardware. Much much much more hashing power, much higher security.

Sure, but this time, using tor. And, no offence to Gavin and the rest of the Bitcoin devs, but the development being done right is something that a large number of developers could do. If they had to step down for some reason, other people could be found to fill their place.

I've felt recently that it would be easier (cheaper) for Gavin and other developers to simply suffer sudden "heart attacks".

We need to round up all our developers and put them in a "safety pit". For their safety.


But seriously, if we suddenly lost our core developers, where would bitcoin be? Do you think others would step up if it could mean assassination?

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: I just realized I'm derailing the thread. Too soon... so....

YAY ASIC MINING

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...

Steve makes a valid point. I got into GPU mining back when GPU mining was first going. I pooled a few grand in with a buddy and we did pretty good. BFL's rigs are great because the cost per GH/s doesn't vary that much between models, and the biggest gap is between the Jalapeno and the Single, both affordable to most people.

Jalapeno : $42.85/GH

Single : $32.00/GH

Mini Rig : $29.90/GH

By upgrading to the Mini Rig, you only save ~$3,000 off compared to 25 Single's worth. This means that for somebody interested in mining, they can drop $150 in to give it a try, if they like what they see, or they enjoy being apart of it, they can pick up a single and the $/Ghash for them, doesn't differ too much from an investor who wants to drop $90,000 on Mini Rigs, after all, the investor who dropped $90,000 only saves $3.00/GH compared to the guy who bought the single. Compare this to how it was when I got into GPU mining...

I don't remember the exact numbers but, our $/MH (note: MH, not GH) was something like $0.50 less than somebody who could only spend $300-500. I really think this is good for bitcoin as a whole. Bad for anybody who recently got into GPU mining, but when I got out of GPU mining, cost of electricity with our rig was greater than amount of bitcoins we where mining.