Quote from: weav on June 26, 2013, 01:31:49 AM

Quote from: coinerd on June 26, 2013, 01:26:58 AM

Quote from: weav on June 26, 2013, 01:08:57 AM

So your ASIC Resistance notion boils down to "economically unviable", and I agree that is a good notion.

I just don't get your distinction between it not being an algorithmic property yet a context property of the system built on that algorithm when in fact these limitations in the ultimately static context arise out of the algorithmic properties in the first place. Unless of course you can provide numbers.

The algorithmic properties will have a very minor impact on the timing of achieving "economic viability".

It's technically nothing at all to do with "the ability to produce an ASIC" for the POW algorithm.

And to bring it further into the clear, I suspect the majority of the difference in cost between producing a scrypt ASIC Miner and a SHA ASIC Miner is going to be in the supporting miner hardware, which is going to require a lot more activity to occur off-chip than bitcoin does.

I'm going to make a statement here that is absolutely outside of my realm of knowledge. It's actually possible that the design, production and fab of a scrypt asic would end up being cheaper than the same process for a SHA ASIC due to this very fact. There are probably people on this forum who know the real answer to that, I don't.

Note very carefully the distinction between the ASIC itself, and the ASIC miner.

What sort of numbers do you mean? We're in practically uncharted waters here (one data point does not make much of a chart). I don't have any.

That's actually my criticism, you don't seem to have any data. Last time I checked people with sophisticated understanding of ASIC design and sCrypt internals determined it is not economically viable, and likely won't be for decades to come, or to put it this way: it seems the algorithmic properties do have a very major impact on the timing of achieving "economic viability".

All right, stating in all caps that it has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO with it may be a bit of hyperbole.

However, the folks you're talking about (just assuming that they are as credentialed as you indicate) don't have any data either. Or at least, they have only the one data point that I have, which is the point at which someone felt that BitCoin ASICs were economically viable.

Bitcoin had nothing to blaze a trail, there was no reason for anyone to buy in or believe it would get to where it is. I don't know what the market cap was when the various people and teams now producing bitcoin ASIC miners decided to move ahead on their projects. I know that they've only recently begun to ship.

Litecoin (no haterade here sorry just the best example of a scrypt coin atm) has had bitcoin to blaze a trail. People are sorry that they missed out on the takeoff of BTC are going to be more eager to speculate, and thus more welcoming to the risk/reward ratio.

Put that burning desire together with moore's law and current research into various computing technologies. I say we have an unpredictable situation here.

A billionaire might wake up tomorrow and say "fuck it let's have a scrypt ASIC". The odds of that having happened when Bitcoin were $2 apiece were pretty small. The odds of it happening to scrypt because someone is sorry they missed out on the "bitcoin rush" are much, much better.

Economic viability is a social factor. Even though the technicalities certainly do have an impact on those decisions. Or to put it another way, "ASIC-resistance" is a property of the coin and it's economy. While the POW algorithm is a admittedly a factor, it's unlikely that it's going to be the actual deciding factor.

The actual deciding factor is going to be "fear of not being first".

That's all IMO, and so is anyone else's estimate of the situation. No disrespect intended. There are too many emotional factors this time around.