I disagree, I don't think there's a hard link between coin prices and difficulty going up. Your statement contradicts itself a bit there too. If prices were to go up because coins are harder to mine, then those mined coins would be more valuable. Making mining more attractive.

I think being reactionary and changing the PoW after the release of ASICs when centralization has become a problem would be a disaster. That just sounds like pure turmoil to me.

LTC was created to be as fair as possible. Attacking high priced custom hardware in the hands of a few in favor of consumer grade GPGPU mining available to everyone makes sense to me. The bar for entry is very low, easy for many to step over. If you have a PC you can start mining reasonably effectively with about $150. Litecoin will seem very different on the whole if you need to spend enough to buy a car to get in the door.

EDIT: Slight change to first comment

It seems like a question of philosophy and degrees to me. Scrypt is GPU and ASIC resistant. Should it be ASIC hostile?

Some of the things talked about when litecoin was just a glimmer in coblee's eye were low initial cost mining, mining on consumer hardware, spreading coins out with a wide mining base, discouraging centralization, being open and transparent.

ASICs worry me. It's a fact that a scrypt ASIC would have to be much more expensive and more complex than their bitcoin mining counterparts. That could work against the majority of miners in the end. All PoW mining eventually comes down to hash/watt. If scrypt ASICs are going to be more expensive AND more efficient at hashing then that could stratify the mining economy. Potentially limiting mining to those with tens of thousands of dollars to spend in a pessimistic scenario. Going further, what if the ASIC producers refuse to sell? Self mining while protecting their ASIC designs in the courts.

There's obvious trust issues there. The real innovation of crypto coins is their trust-less nature. What gmaxwell said about litecoin differentiating itself resonates with me.

What would be the downside of small periodic changes to the PoW? It's pretty much limited to a software problem. I don't think any scrypt ASICs have started mining yet. That would have shown up on the network hashrate. So there's no miners to hurt at this time. Miners and users should have to do more frequent software updates. There would have to be steady software development.

The miner side of that could be a problem with GPU support for cgminer being dropped. On the other hand, a few months ago there was a very successful funding drive for litecoin development. Some will be unaware of changes or refuse to update their software. On the other hand, encouraging users to stay on the latest versions could give huge security and efficiency benefits to the net.

Changing the PoW also sends a message. Litecoin is ASIC HOSTILE, forget about it, don't even try. Without a doubt there will be other coins that would not take this path and scrypt ASICs would be produced eventually (maybe not without a doubt, I think it's likely though). It also says that litecoin is a work in progress, subject to change. I can see that in both a positive and a negative light. Shouldn't we keep trying to make the more perfect coin? It's not a tyranny, any software developers are free to make their bids and users are free to vote.

I'm surprised to say that I'm in favor of the proposal. I'm not fully versed in all aspects of this choice but it seems to be the lesser of two evils and would be in line with litecoin's principals and core philosophy, as I understand them.

EDIT: I don't think this is any kind of problem in the near future. I'm trying to imagine the network YEARS from now. I'd rather not see a couple of data center type mining farms being the only ones hashing for litecoin.

This is pretty obviously an attempt to hijack this thread. I think this is off topic and we should have our arguments about other companies and manufacturers elsewhere. I suggest we ignore or stop responding to off topic posts.

Been mining at liteguardian for a little bit now. Consistently well under 1% rejects. Active and responsive ops on IRC. Good experience so far.

I agree with some of the earlier posters. Please create a fanboi thread or something. I understand, I'm excited too. But this is unreadable. It's pure jabbering.

If you're offended, that's ok. I don't mind.

That's not due to the hashrate. It's latency caused by the design of the hardware. ASICMINER gear (being different) may not have that problem. p2pool can pretty obviously handle lots more than 5Gh/s.

Maybe the thing to do is to ask someone who has won an ASICMINER blade auction and see how it worked for them on p2pool.

Not talking about variance. Talking about increasing profits.

Edit: I agree, variance will be a non issue if on a pool or not. Profits.... ^^^

The difficulty for the alt chains would quickly adjust to bring the rate of coin generation to normal. IMO the markets will soak up low priced coins quickly. It would be near 100% profit on merged mining coins. Extra effort on trying to not 51% the alt coins may take up some time though.


This is a common misunderstanding. It's not your ultimate reject or orphan rate that counts on p2pool. It's your rate relative to the rest of the pool. With a well connected node it's possible to achieve greater than 100% returns. I'd like ASICMINER to do a limited test at least. If an efficient, merged mining p2pool node was set up, the upsides could be significant. The big question is if ASICMINER's custom gear would play nice with p2pool.

Today BTCGuild (a mining pool) hit 48% of the network with some luck. I'd like ASICMINER to spread out their hashing power a bit to maintain a healthy net. With more units coming online and people's habit of choosing the largest pool (see DeepBit) I think it would be wise to take steps sooner rather than later.

Sorry but that's still just not true. A person can be wildly profitable with advanced ASICs and still use the "waste" heat to his/her benefit increasing profits.

Why are we even talking about this? 

Calm yourself. If you can count the heat as a product instead of waste then you can continue mining at a profit when others cannot. There's profits in mining. You overstate it by saying that there's none, that's not true.

I use the waste heat from mining as a product as well. Right up until now my mining has at least broken even with power costs AND produced bitcoins that I can spend (on more heat if I wanted). So because I get the heat (100% efficiency electric heating) and I get at least as much money back as I paid on heat, you could easily say that it's over 200% efficient. In a manner of speaking.

I wish we could get away from the subject of fees, that's really not what we are talking about. You could pay huge fees and still put a bunch of crap on the blockchain. The only people (or person) the fees affect is the miner(s) that found the block. Not the EVERYBODY ELSE that has a copy of the blockchain.

I agree that the amount of data being generated now isn't a problem. We can probably handle larger blocks without issue. But if you read that and conclude that it doesn't matter at all what goes into the blockchain then you are just dead wrong.

Last few posts (excluding the one right before this one) show an epic misunderstanding of what's going on. Bitcoin isn't broken, SD didn't break it. It's a sort of thorn in our sides. On the other hand, how can anybody be glad that the blockchain "is being flooded"? We live in a finite universe, you can't fit an infinite amount of anything in anything. The blockchain is no exception. The amount of fees that SD pays is besides the point. The question at hand is, of what value is all the data that's in the blockchain? We have to carry this with us, it makes sense to only take the essentials. If most of the data is noise then it impacts the useability of bitcoin. So for this reason I say that in the case of the blockchain there is such a thing as garbage, undesirable contents.

Look at my last post. I detail some facts about mining and miners. Miners DO have the power (and authority) to censor transactions. They can DEMAND that you pay a higher fee. This isn't a mistake, these are the brakes designed into the system for EXACTLY THIS PURPOSE. I contend that no system exists that can withstand an infinite amount of bad product, waste or whatever you'd like to call it. Further I expressly retain the right to kick this noise to the curb if I feel it will benefit the network.

Good day sirs!

I'll be blunt and say that I think many posters here don't fully understand the functions of a miner in the bitcoin world.

Not only are miners the armored trucks and tellers of bitcoin, securely transferring value and saying if a transaction is legit or not. But they are also the keepers of the chain. Gardeners weeding out undesirable elements. This is by design, it's a feature of the bitcoin protocol.

The blockchain isn't designed to accept unlimited amounts of abuse. Imagine blocks with unlimited size, you could fill them up with enough spam that no normal users could validate them, breaking bitcoin. If the blocksize is severely limited then bitcoin becomes illiquid, looses value and functionality. So there's disaster on ether side. Miners are the answer and always have been.

There's some elements of democracy to bitcoin. The choice of what clients to use is one. You could hardfork and have your own chain, adopt whatever features you'd like, work within the current chain, ect. Mining is another example of this. By each individual miner saying what he or she will allow into the chain and at what rate, we shape the traffic of bitcoin. It's not a disgrace, it's part of the normal function of the system. For example if half of all miners (controlling half of all hashpower) decide that SatoshiDice transactions are unacceptable then, on average, SD transactions will take twice as long to get a confirm. They have not been banned, people have voted on what will or will not go into the final product.

Morally I find that this solution is just and I think that ultimately it's the answer. I think that the current pool system is a security vulnerability and it reduces the choice (vote) of the individual miner. Mining should be full of choices and decentralized. Inexpensive hardware and software that is p2p is needed for this. We have P2Pool which is an excellent alternative to the centralized pools, Luke-Jr also has an alternative to centralized mining. Right now ASICs are the only mining hardware that's worth it but they are very expensive. I think that in the future though, prices on efficient and fast mining hardware will come down a great deal.

To sum it up, a laissez-faire standard for what goes into the blockchain is what's broken. If you think about it for a second, bitcoin can be permanently harmed by just spamming it with garbage, weeds overgrowing the path obscuring the true beauty of the system (laying it on thick now). It's not the duty of all future users to just take whatever from an unmetered sewage outlet. It's our duty as current users to be thoughtful and respectful of those who will come after us. Miners ARE the stewards of the blockchain and to say different is totally false.

I'd like to buy or trade for an AM3 setup. I've got a quad core 3Ghz processor offered to me so I'm less interested in that unless you can beat the price.

Mobo must have at least 4 RAM slots and 4 SATA ports.

I want used gear at used prices. We all know that this stuff has done a lot of work. Let's price it accordingly.

I'd like to trade for this stuff if you're interested. http://imgur.com/a/GG2Qf#84 http://pastebin.com/kf28ZxZj signed sports jerseys.

Shipping will be to and from Toronto Ontario Canada.

rPXh6UrSBuLzzqKksZchqM4nC67EhfNnAW

The whole idea of the visit is about PR and proving to everybody that the hardware works. Without an independent tester the trip is worthless. Beyond worthless really.

Can you imagine how annoying reeses and Inaba would be if they were in the same room? Let's try to stay on topic.
Also this doesn't really seem like the place for character assassination. Vote people up instead of trying to tear them down.

I don't think clearances should be considered as a qualification for this trip. As ||bit pointed out, #1 that's kinda stupid, #2 how in the hell can you verify it besides waving a piece of paper around? I don't think anybody wants to call whatever organization takes care of clearances.

Vote for OneMiner because I'm less annoying and loud. 

I'd rather people stayed on topic.

1. Reward was offered.
2. Reward reduced and then not paid out.
3. Threats of theft and hacking.
4. (Reduced) Reward was paid out to Rubberduckie after I notified The Koolio that I'd be making this thread anyways.

I don't believe that any of these things I have listed can be contested. I'd like to emphasize that I waited for days and that Rubberduckie was paid after I had notified The Koolio. I think this shows that The Koolio had no intention of paying out and only decided to pay to make himself seem like the victim.

I'll say again, the coins are not even a big deal. It's the threats that I won't tolerate. I'd have just let out the info that the reward wasn't paid. The request for the tag has to do with both issues convincing me that this guy was worthy of it.

Could my messages have been nicer? Yes, I wish they were now. But I did nothing except ask a few questions and say that I would tell others exactly what happened. The content of the things I have posted have not been questioned.

Rubberduckie my address is posted in this thread a couple of times. Keep the coins. I don't give a damn about them.