Quote from: tromp on April 14, 2014, 05:58:47 PM

Quote from: goin2mars on April 14, 2014, 05:42:15 PM

Quote from: tromp on April 14, 2014, 05:11:43 PM

Quote from: whatsthestory on March 24, 2014, 01:44:09 PM

As it' s said in their whitepaper CryptoNight is "a new memory-bound algorithm for the proof-of-work pricing function. It relies on random access to a slow memory and emphasizes latency dependence. As opposed to scrypt every new block (64 bytes in length) depends on all the previous blocks. As a result a hypothetical "memory-saver" should increase his calculation speed exponentially".
More info you can get by yourself here.

So scrypt gives us ASIC-resistance, but this algo is much better at this field.

From 128KB (scrypt) to 2MB (CryptoNight) is a factor 16 increase in memory usage.

To improve ASIC-resistance further, you'd like to require hundreds of MB,
but that would make verification even slower than it already is.

Other memory-bound proofs-of-work avoid this problem (at the cost of introducing more parrallellism)
by having an asymmetry between computation and verification.
E.g. Momentum, memory-coin 2, my own Cuckoo Cycle, or Coelho's scheme
( "An (Almost) Constant-Effort Solution-Verification Proof-of-Work Protocol based on Merkle Trees" AfriCrypt 2008, Fabien Coelho)

Nice to see you took note of this, that's good news!

Would you mind going over some of the parallels/differences between some of these PoW's compared to this one? I'd especially like a comparison between this one and yours, as I've read some of your posts about it and have a little bit of an understanding.

I'm not really familiar with MMC2 (I know it uses AES, but not much more) or Coelho's scheme though.

I'll stick with CryptoNight vs Cuckoo Cycle, assuming a size 2^{32} for the latter
memory 2MB 4GB
memoy-hardness solid can run twice as slow in 3GB, or 50% faster in 6GB
hardness hypothesized; not provable
parallellizable not at least 20+ threads (probably less than 100)
access pattern random random
latency low (cache) high (main memory)
verification slow instant
%computation probably > 90% 33%
%memory probably < 10% 67%

Can you explain what latency means in this particular case? I mean I know it's some kind of delay between something but what stands for "something" here?