Re: Official Anoncoin chat thread (including history)

Say your opinion!

A hypothetical question that does not necessarily have any ulterior motive; If Anoncoin switched hashing algorithm, what type of hashing algorithm would you liked to see then?

a cpu only algo

Agreed, CPU only. 1 CPU, 1 vote.

+

By the way,any hashing algorithm will be matched by ASICS in the coming time.I'm not worried about the algorithm.

Finally, someone else who is able to understand this

How come any hashing algorithm will be matched by ASIC ? Is it possible to explain this in layman terms?

ASIC stands for Application-specific integrated circuit.
The difference between GPU/CPU and ASIC, is that you are "hashing" in an "electrical way" without a layer wrapped around (ASM - CPU language, OS, etc).
Because of this they are much more efficient, but they can only do what their build for.

You can create an ASIC for everything u want. All you need is the money/ppl to design and create it.

When scrypt (LTC) came out, it was ment to be CPU only. Someone found a way to parallelize the algorythm so mining with GPUs got possible. Later the scrypt based coins got really big so creating ASICs was worth it, now they exist since quite some time.

It is possible to make something really hard to be implemented in an ASIC, but most of ppl who say this dont even understand what their talking about. They just say it as a marketing purpose.

Agreed. Perhaps a different way to look at this is the following: how much time will it take for an ASIC of a particular algorithm to appear on the market? If you want to avoid centralization of mining, it seems to me that you are condemned to hard-fork to alternative proof-of-work algorithms every X years. The goal should therefore be to make X as large as possible, all while making the computational gains associated with ASICs vs CPUs as small as possible.

You forgot one thing.
Lets assume we have a new algoryithm which is currently CPU-only. Im porting it to GPU but dont release it to the public, so its easy to 51% attack the network for me. Someone else could created an ASIC in the meantime and therefre would have 51%+ more than me.

ASIC is not "bad", its the opposite. Once ASICs are out, its hard to optimize more. Therefore there will be no sudden spike in hashrate. Of course it first needs time that enough ppl run ASICs, but afterwards its "safer".