Have the scrypt asics arrived already?
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The changeover would be a lot of trouble. Everyone will have to get the new miner and start mining with that immediately after the hardfork. There will also be a lot of complaints from miners later on who will have been mining on the old chain.
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It would not be easy. We would have to give at least a months notice and send the clients constant messages to upgrade. Right now I’m not even sure that we have a viable solution to move to, we do not just need to replace Salsa and SHA-256 we also have to come up with a working GPU miner. There are many other challenges that we need to get past.
Hopefully these miners will eventually thank us for providing a top tier coin that can be mined with GPUs. We could be the only coin on BTC-e that can be mined on a home computer without an expensive ASIC. I understand the concern, this is a brave move but one that needs to be looked at long term, not at the immediate obstacles.
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There is some confusion here.
1. I am not against ACP per say, in fact I was for it, as the only alternative was Feathercoin being destroyed by deliberate attackers in 2013.
2. The algorithm Wellenreiter and I have been working on is for the difficulty change over, not a replacement to scrypt… We have assessed and improved on “Kimoto Gravity Well”.
3. I do not agree on changing the Scrypt based algorythm yet. However, I have been thinking about the scrypt replacement and am still keeping an open mind to wither it is feasible or wanted.I have given various evidence that the assumptions being made about the effect of Scrypt ASICs are FUD.
The main point not being addressed is “trust”. We chose the Scrypt algorythm, people have mined it, we need to get past mining to deployment. Trying to retain GPU mining is not as easy or as relevant as you think, it is also a potentially backward step. My suggestion would be completely reversed and to create BitFeather a SHA 256 ASIC compliment version of Feathercoin…
Also, I am disabled and extremely frail, and with very limited mobility and couldn’t have participated in any development without the help of Wellenreiter.
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Gridseed and dualminers are the small scrypt asics running at the moment, I presume some members here are running them.
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Well, I just posted something on Flower Technologies the other day, and here’s another new one out…
https://www.mining-asics-technologies.com/shop/
Some serious hashing power!!!
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Winter is coming!
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I’ve thought about this a bit, and I might be totally wrong in my assumptions and all that, but here goes… :)
In the end a decision will have to be made. It might be a cynical way to look at it but as I see it, we have 2 choices in the end.
Alt 1
We can stick with scrypt and keep people happy (for a little while) as they don’t have to hassle with a new miner and can just go on as they’ve always done. However, when gen. 2 asics arrive, and gen. 3 and so on, less and less people will have the economy to keep up (in other words, things will end up as with bitcoin).
Alt 2
The second alternative is to constantly fight the asics by developing counter measures in the algo. You might make miners angry since it’ll be a lot of hassle with new clients and so on. However, regular Joe will always be able to mine without having to put in half a year of salary in one investment. A investment that might not even work out as expected due to a lot of factors. Simply put, it’s a huge risk the investor have to take.
Consequences
So, what’s good and bad in this mess?
We’re mostly looking at this from a miners perspective, however the coin isn’t just there for miners, right? The asic way will send regular Joe and his graphics cards to the sideline, but the coin get a chance to grow and prosper in terms of mining power. If the coin grows the day to day usage probably also will, which would be a good thing. However the competition out there is hard, so in the end it could end up well, but it could also be a case where miners point their asics in another direction. Why would one mine FTC when there’s more profit in another coin? This is where added value comes in. If it ends up this way, FTC will need added value compared to other coins. I’m not sure what this could be, but I’m sure we can come up with things!
This kind of leads us to the second alternative. If we instead choose a way where we constantly fend of asic miners with new counter measures, it would keep regular Joe on the pitch. My guess is that there are A LOT of regular Joes out there (I’m one of them for sure). Compared to other coins, we can focus on the added value that any one with a graphics card can mine the coin, without having to put all their life savings on the line. By doing that we can get a larger group of people mining. A larger group mining would mean more people using the coin, but also spreading the word about the coin to none-miners. In the end, what we want is a currency used by the people, but also empowered by the very same people using it. A small amount of miners with huge mining power doesn’t really fit into that picture imho.
Conclusion
Sure, the second solution would be a bit of a hassle if the algo need to be changed to often, but the amount of happy people that can stay mining should outweigh the angry bunch of people by far.
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I think the point is actually to buy ourselves time to have an open source, cheap to produce, ASIC miner that is specific to ftc’s fresh algo.
We want to have what bitcoin has and what litecoin will have. We want to be kings of our own “castle”. (The castle been our own algo)
Hopefully, other coins will follow suit. Pre-existing scrypt based currencies will copy us and implement our unique algo.
ASIC’s are a good thing.
But if we were to try compete with litecoin for the crown of scrypt’s then we would be left dead in the water like what will happen to 99% of all the other scrypt coins out there. (And also like what actually happened to 99% of the Sha-256 coins when btc’s ASIC miners were released.)
Ftc was never intended to compete with litecoin. We were designed to compliment them and also bitcoin. This can not happen if we are fighting them for ASIC market share.
It truly is that simple.
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I’m against Scrypt ASIC . There are two ways to deal with it. ^-^
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Technical means. Upgrading to a new mutil-algorithm. eg: BLAKE2b and SHA-3.
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Economic instruments . Upgrading to 50%PoW + 50%PoS . Each block has 100FTC used to pay interest,another 100FTC used to pay miner.
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Just thought I’d post the latest news update from Alpha Tech.
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anyone used alpha tech? quite like the idea of them being a uk company
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KCMiner announce 2 Million Dollars worth of Pre-Order and Vertcoin goes through a massive pump… I think the writing is on the wall with that one…
I’m trying to cover all bases with this one, Got 2 Terraminer IV incoming, the 100Mhs Scrypt miner from KCMiner is ordered, I"m still building GPU Rigs and I have 40 Gridseeds here which make me feel like a cheap hooker, I hate them, so I’ve put them up on eBay…
