Quote from: amincd on April 19, 2013, 03:00:08 AM

Are we sure that there won't be any ASIC manufacturers that will sell them? All it takes is one volume manufacturer to make ASICs available to the masses.

Well my (A-level economics grade;) economics argument is market price is set by supply and demand, the supply and competition is limited and the barrier to entry large, so its a sellers market and so the sellers will either not-sell and mine, or sell at a small margin below utility value so the buyer takes the market risk and the seller takes most of the projected profit. Ie they'll charge a massive margin, which yes invites competition, but unlike a normal market there is a floor to how much they'll be undercut - the mining value. The next manufacturer will do the same thing, as they also leverage their barrier overcoming investment, so I dont think the market can fix this.

Maybe bitcoin price volatility helps somewhat while it lasts - big hardware manufacturers maybe dont want penny-stock odds - thats more VC profile - established owners of fabrication plants, chip design houses etc have a business to run, and want to reduce their projected sales volatility. However I could see bitcoin price volatility reducing as the market matures and derivatives contracts availability appears - and that would elevate the above problem.

So I am (and was from the beginning) concerned there was a risk hashcash could end up stacked in favor of big players because they can pay for the development and contracts etc and mine their own equipment. And with hardware - hardware hackers can get somewhere, but no where near AMD gpus and Intel cpus - the analog of that level of manufacture and design. And the AMD & Intels investment level is huge. I think it comes down to what the price/performance/power graph looks like between generic hardware (GPU), close to current moores' hw limit big funding hardware (VC or existing big co), small biz hardware (butterfly), and hackerspace level hardware hackers can do. If there is a big discontinuity between hackerspace or kickstarter, the p2p nature of bitcoin may erode in a few years

Maybe bitcoin ought to community use some of that $1bil market cap to do something mega-kickstart. Maybe there is even a self-interest in that. If bitcoin loses its p2p nature I expect the currency value to drop.

If I was a hardware guy with like ex-intel chip designer experience - I would go for this right now. But I know close to zip about ASIC & CPU/GPU design at layout compiler etc level. A detailed and airtight kickstarter contract could bootstrap availability of close enough to moore's law edge to defend the p2p nature for scalable investments and profitability down to $100 level. But on the receiving end with those kickstarter projects they look like make-money-fast schemes for the operators of unknown technical skills and execution ability. Like butterfly but much worse. You need hardware design credibility, execution ability history, openness and a contract that on independent legal review guarantees community access without the kickstarted employees walking off with 99% of the profit or miners.

(I figured this out the hashcash big player hw design issue in 1997 and had some other candidate cost function ideas re anti-spam - note bitcoin has pushed hashcash harder than spam might have because there is more money and motive involved so the answer may change - for hashcash anti-spam / anti-DoS for anonymous remailers and other anti-DoS applications I took the risk because my estimate was the extreme simplicity, ultra fast and simple and human readable mechanism and 100% distributed and 100% scalability prototcol was just too cool to pass up and the spamming profitability business model has ultra slim margins so even with near universal scale deployment it would be safe from mega investments . Its not many things that can accurately claim to be 100% distributed and 100% scalable. Not a coincidence I was at the time a distributed systems PhD student and crypto fan - distributed systems field studies scalability limits and distributed algorithms.)

Maybe thats what Satoshi's moving on plan is - protect the p2p nature with a hw manufacturing stealth project funded with discretely siphoned post anonymity bug genesis bitcoin hoard.

If there was a way to bootstrap and keep p2p levels of market availability and profitability, you can see the advantages of keeping to the hashcash gold-standard. It stood 16 years test of time so far cryptographically, and thats worth something, quite a lot of bitcoin's viability is based on that stability. It also keeps the satoshi-quo, which I like.

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Also, won't sCrypt eventually be dominated by specialized mining rigs any way? There are already FPGAs being developed for it, and if hashing sCrypt continues growing as a business, I think it's only a matter of time before specialized hardware is designed for it and GPU mining becomes out of reach.

I agree. Without being a concrete design, and very much wild-discussion material - maybe a fair cryptographic p2p lottery elected function each epoch chosen at random from a massive function family.

But its hard to design a function family where all functions have enough variability to reduce the GPU/ASIC gap, and with hashcash-like properties (fast verification, compact storage, no shortcut).

Btw it would also be desirable to have something generic enough that as the hardware that gets built would if configurable enough (if the function family heads towards general program) it has dual uses. Ie it IS a next gen GPGPU and that in itself could help accessibility as there is lots of market demand for such things from the scientific community.

Or a 6month design competition with review for security (no hidden trap-doors), fast verification, and then a replacement chosen via fair lottery. I figure 6months ought to break the ASIC or higher end design cycle for a new function up a bit.

Ps I presume everyone heard of Jakobsson & Juels "Bread Pudding" protocol
http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/node.asp?id=2049

Trying to get the miners to do useful work.

However absent an efficiently publicly auditable proof-of-work that is fairly tied to the computations of a homomorphic encryption scheme, their proposal as far as I can see not possible to scale with decentralized trust. (Email me if you understood the import of that last sentence

And I dont like non-decentralized things.

Juels was also the same author that reinvented something hashcash-like but online (Client Puzzles). (Offline is better as its more private, and publicly auditable, client puzzles are not). Juels was not aware of hashcash at the time. I have a link to that one and others on:

http://hashcash.org/papers/

Adam