Post
Topic
Board Mining (Altcoins)
Re: EQUIHASH ASICS!?!?! Can it really be?
by
vorpalspear
on 04/04/2018, 08:47:26 UTC
no it can't be, but equihash is more prone to fbga than etheruem for example, so in the future it's possible to have the hash rate much higher, i think what you linked oculd be a rig that mine equihash, made of amd gpu like they did with the panda miner for etheruem, at first everyone claimed that it was an asic, but it was just composed by gpu chipset
The new Bitmain Ethash miner on the horizon (shipping in August) matches GPUs in hashrate/watt, so that indicates also it is probably merely some GPUs with lots of memory in a box.  But the thing is, it costs $800 for the equivalent of 5x 1080 Ti or 5x Vega 64.  So _if_ it really is some standard GPU chips in a box with memory, then this could spell the end of using regular graphics cards for mining, because you should be able to reprogram such a box o' GPUs for virtually any coin.  On the other hand, if new crypto-algorithms required the latest patented architecture of NVIDIA/AMD to be able to get a good hashrate, then maybe generic GPUs in a box won't be able to hack it.  

What I'd like to see is something like x16r that combines the most supposedly-ASIC-resistant algos out there.  So it could use Equihash, a new permutation of daggerhashimoto, yescrypt, an Nvidia-Volta-specific algo, an AMD-Vega-specific algo, and a few more like the latest version of cryptonight.  So to mine something like this efficiently you'd need at the minimum a good CPU, a recent NVIDIA card and a recent AMD card all in the same machine.  

I'm not a computer architecture expert, so I don't know if the above is a workable or good idea, but obviously something has to be done besides forking every 6 months. How do you know the core devs aren't colluding to produce their own ASICs ahead of release? People who want freedom and privacy will move to the more decentralized ASIC-resistant PoW crypto, and people who don't value their freedom or privacy will go back to using paypal and visa/mastercard.  And all the ASIC coins will be the first ones broken (probably covertly) by quantum computers.