Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: defending ahead the p2p nature of bitcoin - blending hashcash & scrypt
by
mmeijeri
on 20/04/2013, 07:08:55 UTC
The risk is p2p miners arent going to be able to get access to equipment
that can financially compete with this equipment.  Butterfly seems like
a small player - maybe they'll ship.  But what can be done with the
above scale could eclipse their power and efficiency, probably in the
same way ASIC outclasses GPUs and I can see market reasons why
you or I wont be able to buy them.

I'm more worried about the possibility that governments around the world would ban private possession of ASIC mining rigs and would deploy large farms themselves. There are only so many places in the world where you can fabricate ASICs, so that would make them easy for governments to controls. Also, by definition ASICs are application-specific, so there would be no fallout on other applications.

I'd look for a hashing algorithm for which ASICs offer less than an order of magnitude improvement over at least FPGAs, which cannot be suppressed. No such improvement over GPUs would be even better and ideally ordinary desktop PCs should be competitive. Surely it must be possible to find a hashing function that requires the full functionality of a general purpose CPU.