Quote from: 2112 on May 14, 2018, 10:41:49 PM

Quote from: Carlton Banks on May 14, 2018, 09:30:38 PM

Would it be worth pursuing the obverse strategy also, i.e. try to target the weaknesses of ASICs when designing the hash algorithm?

That approach in reality becomes: play to the weaknesses of the education of the cryptocoin developers. The sad reality is that nowadays most of the computer science graduates have no idea about logic design and architecture beyond the ubiquitous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture from 1945. Moreover, after learning what the typical fixed-program ASIC does they are still mentally stuck in the next decade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mealy_machine (1955) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore_machine (1956).

You really should read the other referenced threads, e.g. "ASICs mining game"

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3788591.0

and the referenced external post https://blog.sia.tech/the-state-of-cryptocurrency-mining-538004a37f9b :

Sia dev, David Vorick, seems to me just like an ordinary hypocrite, a person who attempted a crack against his own aglo, get bribed to do so, probably. The referenced article is a part of his mission and of Bitmain's canonical propaganda these months, discouraging ASIC resistance attempts in PoW domain.

Monero did it and there is nothing Bitmain can do about it with all the resources and talents accumulated in their corporate. And yet cryptonight 7 was just a minor tweak to the algo made in a rush.

There is no flexible ASIC, it is cheap journalism, there is no bar sliding from 0% flexible ASICs to 100% flexible ones(!), it is just a pile of hype and propaganda invented by Bitmain to sustain its dominance in btc mining and expand it to other coins.

Ethash is a solid ASIC resistant algorithm, as Vorick has admitted in his embarrassing article, and I don't believe Bitmain has been able to do much about it and E3 is an architectural attack that enjoys the chaos in ram and gpu market nowadays. It is completely possible to have a practically ASIC proof PoW algorithm. Some ideas has discussed here and there is a lot to discuss more.

Saying that a cpu is an ASIC optimized for Von-Neumann range pf problems, or a gpu for 3D algebra, does not change anything, even for a bit!

Intel, AMD, Nvidia, ... chips are optimized chips for a very wide range of calculations, wide enough to make them usable for almost any application. An attacker can do whatever s/he wants with a specific application but when it comes to a complex enough problem, an ASIC resistant PoW algorithm, nobody can go further than a state of the art gpu unless s/he manages to become a competitor (and a winner) in gpu market as well.