Post
Topic
Board Altcoin Discussion
Re: Building the next generation FAST CRYPTO CURRENCY MINING MACHINE
by
malevolent
on 21/04/2013, 20:14:20 UTC
It should take 10 minutes with a transaction fee

Not sure where you are from but 10 minutes waiting at a cash register is unacceptable in American commerce.  So if you are third in line it will take 1/2 hour to buy milk.

Not sure where you are from but reading doesn't hurt Wink For low-value transactions no waiting is necessary.

So I'd like to begin a discussion about building a device that solves the scrypt proof of work.  And so we need to start with a rudminetary understanding. Here it is in all it's wikipedia glory

Are you sure it's worth it? I like scrypt but it is still relatively new and I wouldn't be surprised if someone found a flaw in it that would render it less safe, after all it is as old as Bitcoin (created in 2009) and also created by only 1 guy (although Satoshi did use some other peoples' ideas and consulted them). If the flaw requires a change of an algorithm in Litecoin, all those expensive ASICs will become useless.

It will be a long before it will be worth to invest so much money to design & manufacture an ASIC for scrypt.

We all knew that ASIC's were only printing gold if you were the first one to get one. GPU farms prior to ASICS managed in some fashion to centralize mining. Someone with a thousand cards made far more then someone with ten. But it didn't stop anyone. I don't see how things have changed. The landscape has restarted and we all need to buy ASICs. I surely will, even if it's not the money-printer I was hoping that it would be.

+1
As Bitcoin gained in popularity the barrier for 'an average Joe' became too high already without any ASICs. Until recent price increases a lot of people wouldn't have been able to afford to mine with their electricity costs and often hardware costs (in US GPUs are cheap, especially 2nd hand). Difficulty is growing and when it stabilizes with price, only those with the best economies of scale will remain in business with profit margins decreasing.