Quote from: bytemaster on April 13, 2014, 01:00:48 AM

Quote from: eldentyrell on April 12, 2014, 11:59:44 PM

Proof-of-X for X!=Work is largely off-topic for this thread. Only POW serves as an origin of scarcity anchored to something physical (computing devices).

The scarcity of BTC and POW systems has nothing to do with the POW algorithm and everything to do with the social contract of the nodes.

Well, you and I clearly disagree about that.

Quote from: bytemaster on April 13, 2014, 01:00:48 AM

This thread, being about POW innovations is really aimed at network security in the most decentralized manner possible.

"Security" is a vague enough term that it's hard to disagree there.

Quote from: bytemaster on April 13, 2014, 01:00:48 AM

You don't think someone could build a special-purpose motherboard / CPU designed to minimize overhead costs around the DRAM?

Sure; in fact, I expect them to. But the whole point is to pick a POW algorithm where the returns of doing this diminish long before the "special-purpose motherboard"'s cost gets anywhere near a quarter or so of the cost of the DRAM.

Quote from: bytemaster on April 13, 2014, 01:00:48 AM

You think large warehouses of case-less, power supply-less, liquid cooled, over-clocked, modules would not make mining at home unprofitable?

I think that the people who design pretty cases for miners will find other jobs.

I think that unpowered modules are pretty damn useless.

I think that overvolting DRAMs will actually DECREASE the number of operations in their lifetime before they fail.

I think that water-cooling DRAMs without overvolting will not even double their performance.

I think that moving SHA-256 from a GPU to an ASIC has already produced a 1,000-fold increase in performance-per-square-millimeter-of-silicon.

Quote from: bytemaster on April 13, 2014, 01:00:48 AM

You think bulk buys cannot make it significantly cheaper for these large factories?

Nope, not significantly. DRAM is already a razor-thin-margin business. That's why I picked it.

Quote from: bytemaster on April 13, 2014, 01:00:48 AM

The reality of POW is that security is proportional to economic cost and whether the attacker is spending $500 M on SHA256 ASIC or $500M on dedicated hardware the result is the same,

I don't think you've been reading this thread. This makes dedicated hardware a disadvantage.

Quote from: bytemaster on April 13, 2014, 01:00:48 AM

If you increase the cost-per-hash with memory-hard POW, you will get fewer hashes but the same level of security and only the most efficient operations will be able to mine profitably.

Yeah, you definitely are not reading the thread. Go back and read the part that says "has a cost-of-ownership dominated by silicon rather than electricity".

Don't take it personally, but I tend to stop replying to people who aren't at least trying to follow the discussion...