Post
Topic
Board Altcoin Discussion
Re: [LTC] Changing the litecoin Proof of Work function to avoid ASIC mining?
by
ryangrant
on 07/05/2014, 01:54:25 UTC
From my understanding, a coin dev wants to have their coins network be secure. IE spread on mining power. The mining power itself is somewhat irrelevant from my understanding. Example:
10 people mine GoofyCoin, They use gpu's, each person has 1 GPU, all same model gpus. That's 1/10th of the mining security. Someone decides to add another GPU to their rigs, they now own a bit more of the mining power. One person joins making it 11 people now, They have an asic that can do the same as 4 gpu's. This becomes closer to threatening the security however there are enough gpu miners to still hold the spread of mining power to not make it a 51% attackable coin yet.

Now who do you think would be more willing to buy gpu's over asics? most consumers is generally the answer that people say.

Asics cannot be sold for other purposes that are useful via consumers or via enterprises as far as I know. Maybe MIT and schools may buy asics for computational math experiments, however still very hard to sell compared to graphics cards.

I would say every day consumers are more willing to try out mining and mine a bit with a high end graphics card that can help pay the power bill and maybe a little or all of their graphics cards price, paid for via the community that invests into crypto.

If we promote asics we are potentially eliminating the demand for the crypto which may lower the price of crypto.

I would rather have gpu miners and cpu miners mining crypto instead of asics due to the fact that the consumer is going to be willing to buy a graphics card or a cpu over buying a asic which has no additional use once it's obsolete. At least gaming cards and cpu's are useful in every day consumer use.

what i see is take kwh price plus a premium fee that covers mining, then you get your end result for how much a crypto coin should be of value. for example I pay .14kwh after taxes on my power. My hardware costs to setup a 24/7 miner with one gpu would be around $700. If it takes 300 watts total to run my PC 24/7 at .14 kwh that alone will cost me:$367.92 USD in power a year.
 If people want me to help secure the network and providing coins to the network for transactions, then I should be getting paid a minimum of 367.92 USD per year for this service. I would most likely also add some sort of premium since I have to buy the hardware, however that hardware at the same time is hardware that I may want to keep or can resell at a later point. Lets say a 50% premium rate on that $700.

That means after 1 year I'll have made back $350 on the $700. Then can either use the graphics card or sell the parts.

I strongly believe our coin networks should be based upon hardware prices and power prices. I'm no mathematician so I'm sure the above examples I provided could use a better formula. Either way the above example promotes proper stable growth instead of people whom buy asics since there aren't a lot of people whom would buy asics compared to people that would buy gpu's. coins that want to run on asics should be asic algo specific and the other algo's should be gpu specific. Luckily now we have scrypt-n that was meant to be for asic resistance to keep consumers in the game for mining. It would just be nice to see scrypt come back to its old ways of no asics since a lot of the alts that we're used to were mined primarily on gpu's for a long time and asics have ruined it.