Scrypt Jane Research - Post Ideas Here
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[quote name=“Smoothie” post=“15163” timestamp=“1371275770”]
[quote author=jeremiel link=topic=1839.msg15145#msg15145 date=1371266899]
[quote author=Smoothie link=topic=1839.msg15106#msg15106 date=1371251569]
[quote author=jeremiel link=topic=1839.msg14912#msg14912 date=1371231876]
I’ll play devil’s advocate.Let’s go over the scenario of literally changing the algorithm. What’s the process everyone would have to follow(miners and users) once it’s changed? New client? Restructure of pools? New miner deployed? A start date for change over?
[/quote]Did we miss this post? ^
I am curious on the steps this would need to be streamlined and seamless for such a large change.
[/quote]No one answered it. The current conversation is about the justification for moving to a new algorithm.
[/quote]I personally think this should be a part of the discussion, if it isn’t feasible then no point in looking to make modifications. I’m not against change, just feel we need a plan.
[/quote]I agree hence why I asked the questions. Yes we are talking about a software change but what would be required by the rest of the community to get onboard with a new “possible” format. Sort of a fire drill. I know talking about could make people perceive it’s actually happening besides it being concept implementation plan.
Also, it’s friday… people take breaks on friday from the internets sometimes…
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Remember that we are just debating this issue right now and that nothing is set in stone.
I will speak to Coinotron about what he might need to do on his end. Going with Scrypt-Jane I would commission Coinotron to do what he needs to do and then test it on my testnet. Whatever solution for the pools we come up with will be shared with the community well ahead of time. Perhaps the client can switch between hashing and the pools do not need to do anything, I’m not sure about this. I’ve spoken to Coinotron briefly about this already and he did not put forward any objections.
The biggest challenge is getting the miners to move over. After the change all their Scrypt shares will become rejected until they restart with the new algo. If we can get cgminer to support it then miners could close, rename Scrypt to Scrypt-Jane in their config then fire up their miners again.
This is all doable but it is going to cause a lot of work for everyone involved. I do not know of another coin that has changed its hashing algo like this so we have nothing to compare against.
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[quote name=“Kevlar” post=“15018” timestamp=“1371242752”]Bitcoin maintains it’s price because people have a vested interest in seeing it do so… so it does.
[/quote]
That vested interest takes many forms. My partners folks invested 1000’s of $ in to BTC. Some folk want to see a change to FIAT markets. Others like the concepts of what these currencies bring to markets.Guess what I am saying is, is that ASIC chips as a form of investment is not the main thing holding the value up… far from it.
Personally I’m here at FeatherCoin because of ASIC mining. The ASIC resistant claim sold this concept to me. It told me it was fairer and available to more folk wishing to get involved at the grassroots level.
I don’t for a single minute think I have a strong argument on the real pro’s and Con’s of ASIC mining… but ASIC set ups will not be available to all in any sense imho and thus making FeatherCoin a less accessable coin if it went down the ASIC route.
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Bushstar,
Thanks for addressing that point.
I will have to reread this thread to get a better grasp of the details of the new hash algorithm etc to understand for myself what would need to happen in the scenario that we go forward with this.
Perhaps we can list the pros and cons and discuss it that way also.
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I am confused to as this is technically feasible. Wouldnt changing the algorithm break all the previous calculations? IE everyone would have to start fresh?
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No, the previous calculations are not recorded. Verifying a block is different from creating one. The clients and miners including transactions only need to verify.
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Thank you Bushtar for responding. Everyone needs to know this is all concept but even implementation could be painful for everyone. In the end I see this coming down to mining software. Though there might be a bit of time where the network hashrate is 0… that could be scary.
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[quote name=“Smoothie” post=“15237” timestamp=“1371293542”]
Perhaps we can list the pros and cons and discuss it that way also.
[/quote]Sounds like a good idea, I am more interested in the cons of Scrypt-Jane to see what challenges we might face.
[quote author=jeremiel link=topic=1839.msg15363#msg15363 date=1371315222]
Thank you Bushtar for responding. Everyone needs to know this is all concept but even implementation could be painful for everyone. In the end I see this coming down to mining software. Though there might be a bit of time where the network hashrate is 0… that could be scary.
[/quote]Advanced Checkpointing could help in the move to make sure no one starts replacing the chain after the move. We would also need some people to hash against Scrypt-Jane before the switch over, all these shares will be rejected until the network hits the new hashing algo block.
A lot of testing needs to go into this. Later on if we are still interested in this and there are no show stoppers then I will run a Feathercoin Scrypt-Jane test pool with a fast difficulty adjust so together we can test this solution and see how it works in practice. We can trial run the change over from one algo to another on the test network.
We do not want to leave anything in this process to chance.
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[quote name=“Entimp” post=“15211” timestamp=“1371287406”]
Personally I’m here at FeatherCoin because of ASIC mining. The ASIC resistant claim sold this concept to me. It told me it was fairer and available to more folk wishing to get involved at the grassroots level.I don’t for a single minute think I have a strong argument on the real pro’s and Con’s of ASIC mining… but ASIC set ups will not be available to all in any sense imho and thus making FeatherCoin a less accessable coin if it went down the ASIC route.
[/quote]This exactly describes the way i think about it … I think asic will be bitcoins death because it is way to specialized to buy for the average guy even if they can drop the price to 1/10 of what it is now.
Why would the average person buy such a thing ? For the moment mining is profitable but it won’t stay for long anymore and if they can drop prices of asic, only more hashing power enters the market and difficulty will go insane. There will always be a selected group of miners if no real profit can be made.
The other case is decentralization i think. How are they going to stay decentralized if GPU miners walk away to FTC ;-) and asics are not in every household because lack of interest.
Banks and cooperating governments aren’t going to be disinterested if the currency isn’t owned and ruled by them, even not speaking of anonymity… They definitely are capable finding one company guy interested to get extra rich building only asics for govs to counteract decentralization and do a 51% attack
If there will go to much money to the crypto-currency i think govs will create their own SuperAsicPool lolz ;-)If ftc stays cpu,gpu,apu based they will be able to enter every room and every device and this will decentralize in such a way 51% of govs is not possible anymore
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I don’t think asics will kill BTC, rather move it to its next phase of its life where mining has smaller profit margins but people still will use it as currency. People will only make a little bit of money to cover electricity and maybe make back their asic investment. In turn Bitcoin will become mostly just a safe and secure currency with a large hash rate but no profitability. Gpu miners will stay with scrypt currencies and invest in them by buying hardware and mining. Scrypt currencies will have a bigger upturn over the next few years and someone will come out as a true leader in the market. I think there is still room for a memory heavy CPU mined coin as well, especially one that the ordinary person can point their laptop or tablet at while not in use.
Our government can easily build asic farms and derail Bitcoin if they want to. It would be an easy switch to get their trusted chip manufactures to make asic chips within the next year. However with GPU and CPU mining it would be a lot more costly because they would have to go through AMD or Intel. Also due to supply it would be a lot harder for a government to get enough GPUs to takeover a larger scrypt network.
Back to scrypt jane…I have tried yacoin mining for several weeks and it was ok… The algorithm is not that much different than scrypt as it stands now. I was working on modifying cgminer to run it but didn’t have enough time to finish getting the bugs out and I wanted to mine FTC anyway. The thing about yacoin mining was that so many variables changed that the profitability would swing wildly and the diff was always needing to adjust because of the N changes. It was cool in concept but with poor support both for pools and miners it will never take off.
Now in regards to FTC, I do not think the change from scrypt to scrypt jane would be a smart move. This is because everyone from wallets, pools, miners, to exchanges would be impacted. Depending on how the switch over is executed we could fail miserably and kill our own coin. Yes you may switch over correctly a test coin but you can never predict what is going to happen to a live production coin especially when modifying how the core of it works.
If we want to consider scrypt jane my suggestion is to start with a new coin with a high fixed N that could be FTC’s little brother. I would not have N increase on a set interval but only increase if the developers find that they need to later down the road. If you get the N value high enough then GPU mining will not be possible or profitable and ASICs will be even farther out or impossible due to enormous memory requirements. I see a very good opportunity in the CPU mining field, there just isn’t a development team around other than us that could pull it off :)
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[quote name=“RIPPEDDRAGON” post=“16186” timestamp=“1371570413”]
If we want to consider scrypt jane my suggestion is to start with a new coin with a high fixed N that could be FTC’s little brother.
[/quote]Yes, I’ve suggested that before. I don’t think it was received very well, but I still stand by it.
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[quote name=“Kevlar” post=“16188” timestamp=“1371570698”]
[quote author=RIPPEDDRAGON link=topic=1839.msg16186#msg16186 date=1371570413]
If we want to consider scrypt jane my suggestion is to start with a new coin with a high fixed N that could be FTC’s little brother.
[/quote]Yes, I’ve suggested that before. I don’t think it was received very well, but I still stand by it.
[/quote]Subchains. Soon.
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[quote name=“Kevlar” post=“16188” timestamp=“1371570698”]
If we want to consider scrypt jane my suggestion is to start with a new coin with a high fixed N that could be FTC’s little brother.
[/quote]I’m asking myself : Is FTC’ s implementation of scrypt using a fixed value or not. Litecoin is using 1024 I’ve read…
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FTC uses 1024.
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N = 1024, r = 1, p = 1
N must be a power of 2 between 1 and 2^(128*r/8). Any of three parameters above can be changed. Increase of N and/or r (block size parameter, B = 128*r) and/or p (parallelisation parameter) decreases performance. N*B memory per instance required.
My concern is what kind of scrypt-jane are we going to implement? YACoin replaced Salsa20/8 with ChaCha20/8 (mix function) and SHA-256 with Keccak-512 (hash function). ChaCha20/8 seems to be a good choice since it’s both faster and stronger than Salsa20/8. Keccak-256, the NIST SHA-3 contest winner, is also fast, though I’m inclined to think that [url=https://blake2.net]BLAKE2sp-256[/url] is a better choice.
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[quote name=“ghostlander” post=“16296” timestamp=“1371598493”]
My concern is what kind of scrypt-jane are we going to implement? YACoin replaced Salsa20/8 with ChaCha20/8 (mix function) and SHA-256 with Keccak-256 (hash function). ChaCha20/8 seems to be a good choice since it’s both faster and stronger than Salsa20/8. Keccak-256, the NIST SHA-3 contest winner, is also fast, though I’m inclined to think that [url=https://blake2.net]BLAKE2sp-256[/url] is a better choice.
[/quote]YAC uses chacha and keccak512.
Onecoin uses salsa64 and blake512.
Both use the scrypt-jane implementation, but with a different function to increase Nfactor.
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So, right back to basics… Why exactly are we wanting to change the algo? What are we trying to achieve? Is it simply to stop rogue pool admins flicking their LTC pools to FTC?
All the techno-babble is good but it makes my head hurt. I’m sure Bush, Coinotron, Klovias et-al can make it work technically. We need to ask ourselves “why?”.
If we change the algo we’ll loose miners as it’ll break the autominers the hardcore ftc guys will stay but the profit miners will drop us from their scripts. On the flip side it will [s]stop[/s] reduce the hash/diff spikes so you’ll end up with a more stable hash rate… for about a week. Then everyone will see success, fork the code and start a new coin based on Scrypt-jane and we’ll be back to hash/profitabilty spike again.
Or have i missed the point completely? :-[
As a side note, if you need some hash power and server space to test on i can lend 3MHs and some server space to the cause.
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[quote name=“liteuser” post=“16368” timestamp=“1371636297”]
[quote author=ghostlander link=topic=1839.msg16296#msg16296 date=1371598493]
My concern is what kind of scrypt-jane are we going to implement? YACoin replaced Salsa20/8 with ChaCha20/8 (mix function) and SHA-256 with Keccak-256 (hash function). ChaCha20/8 seems to be a good choice since it’s both faster and stronger than Salsa20/8. Keccak-256, the NIST SHA-3 contest winner, is also fast, though I’m inclined to think that [url=https://blake2.net]BLAKE2sp-256[/url] is a better choice.
[/quote]YAC uses chacha and keccak512.
Onecoin uses salsa64 and blake512.
Both use the scrypt-jane implementation, but with a different function to increase Nfactor.
[/quote]Seems so, but they utilise 64-bit calculations in order to produce 512-bit hashes. They run slow on GPU hardware, though run anyway. There is absolutely no need for us to switch from 256-bit to 512-bit hashes. BLAKE-512 used by Onecoin is the original version submitted for the NIST contest, BLAKE2 is much improved in means of performance. If we decide to switch over to scrypt-jane, let’s choose the strongest and fastest implementation.
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[quote name=“Nutnut” post=“16372” timestamp=“1371639727”]
So, right back to basics… Why exactly are we wanting to change the algo? What are we trying to achieve? Is it simply to stop rogue pool admins flicking their LTC pools to FTC?All the techno-babble is good but it makes my head hurt. I’m sure Bush, Coinotron, Klovias et-al can make it work technically. We need to ask ourselves “why?”.
If we change the algo we’ll loose miners as it’ll break the autominers the hardcore ftc guys will stay but the profit miners will drop us from their scripts. On the flip side it will [s]stop[/s] reduce the hash/diff spikes so you’ll end up with a more stable hash rate… for about a week. Then everyone will see success, fork the code and start a new coin based on Scrypt-jane and we’ll be back to hash/profitabilty spike again.
Or have i missed the point completely? :-[
[/quote]Agreed. There will be serious complications in the short run. The idea is to get out of Litecoin’s shadow completely, so no one would say FTC is a tweaked clone of LTC. It’s supposed to deliver advantage in the long run. I must say such a cryptocurrency algorithm change is unprecedented, so it brings us an additional credit for sure.
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The coin is new enough that it makes sense to change the hash algorithm now if it is ever planned to do it. Many people that mine already follow the forums. If we wait until it is a lot larger there will be more of the mining problems that everyone has already described.
