Post
Topic
Board Speculation
Re: The negative impact of mining farms
by
labsbitforum
on 30/10/2014, 17:35:06 UTC
It's too bad that bitcoin allowed dedicated silicon (FPGA/ASIC) to participate.  If they had adapted to prevent it there still would be large farms of CPU/GPU miners.  But it would be a more level playing field and there would be more use of having that much computational power in play that could also be solving real problems and not just generating a lot of heat and having an overabundance of SHA256 brute force engines lying around.

But in reality it is almost impossible to create a proof-of-work mining algorythm that will forever remain ASIC-resistant so that point is moot


I'm pretty sure someone will come up with a good solution.  Ethereum has a couple approaches that have merit and one will go in to practice soon.
https://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/197/mining-faq-live-updates
https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/06/19/mining/