Quote from: gmaxwell on December 06, 2013, 05:07:51 AM

But if you change the POW periodically in ways which aren't predicable months in advance, and in ways that can't just be generalized with anything more specialized than general purpose consumer hardware... then I do think you would actually have achieved a fairly high degree of asic-proof-ness.

In practice that just means the optimal mining technology will be the world's best FPGA, instead of the world's best fixed-function ASIC. Cheesy

Unless you're capable of creating a substantially different POW function every couple days to defeat skilled, well-funded, and persistent FPGA designers (and C-to-RTL synthesis tools)...

Anyway, I believe it's morally wrong to change the POW 2+ years after launching a coin, if you did not at least mention that possibility when creating it. You would destroy many hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in the "evil" ASIC(s) which, in the long run, will make all cryptocurrencies less secure by encouraging private, secret, centralized ASIC development. And then there's the whole slippery slope aspect - if we can change the POW, what else can we change? How about we increase the block reward 10X so I can haz moar coinz plzz, at the expense of savers?

A significant advantage of existing cryptocurrencies is that the key attributes were made fully public up front, held constant, and not politically revised by any party (so far). If you start making up the rules as you go along, you've just created a less centralized & possibly more democratic, but still politically manipulable, imitation of a Central Bank and fiat currency. Maybe there is demand for that, maybe not, but if you want that, you should at least have the decency to launch it as a new coin, rather than corrupting an existing one.

-rph

rph

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