IMHO there is no such thing as an ASIC resistant algo, RandomJS and ProgPoW notwithstanding.  Ultimately, CPU's, GPU's, and ASIC's are the exact same physical object, manufactured in the same factories using the same process.  The difference is only a matter of purpose and design, and specialized hardware will always outperform general hardware.  GPU's were made for graphics, and CPU's for general computing.  PoW's are necessarily a special class of computing, and ASIC's will always outperform.

ASIC's require a big initial cost to set up the manufacturing.  The first chip is $millions, then they are a few dollars each after that.  There is no (viable) open source toolchain for hardware production, and even the software tools required for producing an ASIC are around 6 digits USD.  That being said, the cost to start manufacturing our ASIC would not be much for a business or startup, maybe $3m.  Plenty of companies and crypto hodlers have that kind of cash.

By "better" we mean it uses less power per hash and is cheaper to produce.  You can see technical details on GitHub.

I'm not interested in convincing you of anything.  This is a giveaway.  Free.  There is no product.  We're not selling anything here.

As for the Decred ASIC, we withdrew when it became clear that the regular consumers, the buyers of Decred ASICs, were going to get hurt.  Our prediction came true, and if you paid for an Obelisk Decred Miner, sorry.  It lost money on electricity the very first day you got it (late).  Here is a brief excerpt from our goodbye letter sent to our mailing list:


We never took any money from anyone for the Decred ASIC, and I stand by that decision.  We saved our customers from themselves.

My reputation is more important to me than making money up-front at the expense of consumers who get scammed.  I'm a serial entrepreneur and my reputation is everything.  Word gets around fast, and I've remained honorable in all my dealings with investors and customers.

I respectfully disagree with that author.  In fact, our release directly falsifies this claim:


The assumption that BitMain is the best at everything is simply false.  Currently, WhatsMiner is significantly better, for example.

Also, consider the community-owned / blockchain-subsidized model.  If, for example, 20% of the mining reward goes to subsidize a community-owned manufacturer that sells units at-cost, then any for-profit company couldn't really compete.  You can see this with shipping companies in the US.  UPS and FedEx have to offer special services at large price increases compared to the subsidized USPS.  There is no way UPS or FedEx could ever deliver a letter for 50 cents.  It could be the same with a mining company.

In the case of CryptoNight specifically, we have already open-sourced a design which knocks the socks off the leading competition.  The best BitMain could do is copy our design.

Project OCA (Open CryptoNight ASIC)

• Open source.
• Permissive Licensing.
• 5x better performance than Bitmain
• Made with love by 7400 (7400digital@gmail.com, https://www.7400.digital/), Tim Olson (https://linkedin.com/in/olsontim), and Salt (https://twitter.com/_vhsv3).  Together, we are altASIC.

What is it?

This is the essential core code for altASIC's CryptoNight ASIC design. It mines "classic" pre-v7 CryptoNight and can run in simulation, on FPGA, or as an ASIC.

This code represents only the essential "memory hard" part of CryptoNight. altASIC additionally has a complete hardware system design with a software controller, an FPGA for initial/final hashes, a high-speed IO bus and logic board, and state-of-the-art power management.

Why make a CryptoNight design?

We believe specialized mining hardware is inevitable for any proof-of-work. Even proofs-of-work bounded by memory bandwidth, like Ethash or Equihash, have custom hardware (ASIC's) which outperform commodity hardware (GPU's) by economically large multiples. There is no proof of work which has in practice prevented the development of specialized hardware miners for coins with sufficient mining value.

ASICs can be beneficial to a chain, since the hashpower can only work on the subset of coins which select the same PoW. The problem arises with the centralization of manufacturing, and the abuse of power by ASIC manufacturers.

If custom hardware is inevitable, then creative solutions to the threat of manufacturing monopolies must be considered. Some approaches we believe could be feasible:

• Community effort to publicly publish the most efficient design with open licensing. This allows anyone with the money to produce equivalent chips, leading to many competing companies and close to at-cost ASICs.
• Non-profit chip design co-op, subsidized by a small portion of the block reward and run by distributed governance. Any for-profit company competing with a blockchain-subsidized Open ASIC manufacturer would have a disadvantage equal to the block donation. This effectively moves the monopoly to a community owned and operated manufacturer.

We believe Open ASICs are the way forward. Long term, the CN tweak schedule and creative new PoWs will be defeated. Rather than evade, we should accelerate commodity ASICs. This open source design is the first step in that direction, and we'd be interested in helping to establish a design co-op and release the first chip.

Technical details and source code here:
https://github.com/altASIC/Open-CryptoNight-ASIC

Jump on the Zcash slack and ask Zooko Wilcox if I am for real.  Surely he qualifies as a luminary.  zcashcommunity.slack.com @zooko

Sure, I accept that.  But no-one has tried to email me at tim@zeropond.com or tim@stacklife.com or tried to contact yvg1900 on Twitter via PM or anything like that.  So if you are not going to bother following up with proofs that I've offered, then you shouldn't continue slinging mud.

Yah we didn't really put any work yet into the top-level site.  We've been working on the pool and faucet for the community, and we put some work into the splash page for mining.  See buy.zeropond.com.  Or come ask around the Zcash community about us: forum.z.cash and especially the Slack community zcashcommunity.slack.com

So are you saying that a good-looking website is not a scam?  Or that a bad-looking website must be a scam?  Or what exactly?

We have a nice reference from @yvg1900 posted on our site, and I've emailed some other people IRL who might have accounts here…

Obviously I'm not very active on this forum.  Let me ask around my real-life contacts to find someone who's on here...

Just email me at tim@zeropond.com to verify.  Also, I've updated my LinkedIn to show Zeropond for some third-party proof https://linkedin.com/in/olsontim

And whoever downvoted my trust in the last hour... WHY?  Don't be a hater.  I've done nothing but try to post about our service.  Please, check our proofs.  Ask me anything!

We've published on our website a Monero View Key which proves our mining revenue.  I've copied it here for your convenience.  Ask me anything!

Zcash Cloud Mining by Zeropond

We are experienced Monero miners (over 300,000 XMR) and we are now setting up a datacenter with Zcash mining software preinstalled on every machine.

We've already written great mining software, but we don't have the funds to buy all the hardware.  So we are selling mining contracts now to buy hardware and set up a datacenter.  We are offering a better performing miner than anything on the market, and we'll keep a little margin for profit.

I'm a serial entrepreneur with several successful businesses https://linkedin.com/in/olsontim
My partner Salt has been mining since 2010.

We are a US-based company, and we'll use a datacenter in the Silicon Valley / San Francisco Bay Area.  We have proof of our Monero mining (see website) and we'll be posting references from people in the crypto community we've done business with.

Pre-register now for free:

buy.zeropond.com

I was thinking about writing one, but 50 BTC "promised" in forum posts is nothing like 50 BTC in an escrow account.  Get actual money into a kickstarter or indiegogo and it's a different story.

About polling: we use a Token Bucket algorithm to minimize query latency.  If a site allows 600 requests in 10 minutes, we actually will make up to 600 requests in the first instant, then wait for the 10-minute window to expire before issuing the next 600 requests.  This approach gives much lower data latency than a simple rate like "1 per second."  We still need to do some work here to space out redundant queries.

Also, the event architecture allows us to share tick data with any number of strategies, so the polling process only happens once no matter how many strategies are active.  The model here is to accumulate real time data, not to poll for conditions.  Instead of saying "fetch some data then analyze it", you write a strategy to accept new data and incrementally update its signals.  Then it can react as soon as new data is received, instead of being on a polling timer.  There are a couple markets now providing streaming data (finally) so again, writing your strategy to work incrementally will pay dividends as the data providers get more sophisticated and start to implement push feeds.

I also like antlr and could definitely see the usefulness of a DSL once we have the baseline system working.

I eschew the term "exchange" because none of the providers are actually exchanges– they are broker-dealers with deposit accounts.  Instead, Coin Trader uses the term "Market" which generically may be a broker-dealer or an exchange (although no true exchanges exist yet, AFAIK).

Coin Trader allows you to work with either generic Listings (BTC.USD) or what we call MarketListings which are tied to a specific Market (BITSTAMP:BTC.USD).  In your use case, you will write Esper to capture all Trades which are joined to one of five specific MarketListings, then you will get the individual prices for each Market.  You may then place an Order by specifying a specific MarketListing to trade on a particular Market, or you can place an Order for a Listing which may be spread across Markets, as the order routing engine may decide.

Cryptocoin Partners will be a commercial organization with additional features & services on top of the open source platform, so the packages were migrated to .ORG to emphasize the open-source nature of the released code.  cointrader.org is already taken by someone else, so it is unavailable.  The commercial Cryptocoin Partners company will offer market making and private investment opportunities using our proprietary order routing & machine learning.  We have no intention of crippling the open-source code; we just do not want to make public our own order routing and trading strategies.

The license is Apache 2.0.  I tagged the github project as such but forgot to add a LICENSE.txt file... will do now.

More documentation about the whole system will follow in the next couple weeks as I prepare for the presentation and launch on the 23rd.

I like rules engines too, and have used Drools in the past, but for this application you really gotta check out Esper http://esper.codehaus.org/ which is at the core of Coin Trader.  Esper is like a rules engine for time series, and in combination with Coin Trader's schema, you can create all kinds of triggers and signals on market events:

@When(" select avg(price) from Trade.win:time(30 sec) where symbol='BTC.USD' ")
void averagePriceChanged( double avgPrice ) {
  if( avgPrice < triggerPrice )
    placeMarketOrder( Listings.BTC_USD, Side.BUY, 1.0 );
}

But it's still Java and Esper– not for beginners.  Our goal is to support machine-learning based trading, so anyone who could make strategy writing more accessible would give a lot of value to the project.  From an operational point of view also, a simple deployment / configuration language might make a lot of sense.  I'm not sure what you have built or want to build, but if you connect with me on github or LinkedIn or email me at shamme/gmail-com, I'd be glad to discuss it more discretely.

Thanks for the great comments.  ATP gets the job done in a very direct way, too ad-hoc for my liking.  Coin Trader's biggest contribution so far is the schema and architecture.  Our polling implementation offers superior reactivity, and the Esper engine is perfect for time-series analysis.  Esper also allows us to easily record and replay events exactly, whether in simulation, paper-trading, or live trading.

We have some better documentation now on the Readme:
https://github.com/timolson/cointrader

I'm getting interest from devs here in San Francisco will be making an intro presentation on June 23rd to the SF Bitcoin Devs group:
http://www.meetup.com/SF-Bitcoin-Devs/

Announcing Coin Trader, an open-source, Java-based backend engine for algorithmically trading cryptocurrencies.  It integrates with existing libraries for market data and order execution, plus it provides persistence and an event-based architecture for backtesting, algorithm design, and live trading.  It is not quite ready for live trading, but with a few additional contributions we will have a robust algo trading platform.  See the github site for documentation.

https://github.com/timolson/cointrader

Tim Olson
http://linkedin.com/in/olsontim

Announcing Coin Trader, an open-source, Java-based backend engine for algorithmically trading cryptocurrencies.  It integrates with existing libraries for market data and order execution, plus it provides persistence and an event-based (Esper) architecture for backtesting, algorithm design, and live trading.  It is not quite ready for live trading, but with a few additional contributions we will have a robust algo trading platform.  See the github site for documentation, and I am happy to provide support via email: shamme – gmail/com

https://github.com/timolson/cointrader

Tim Olson
http://linkedin.com/in/olsontim