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

TimOlson

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