From: Luke Dashjr <luke@dashjr•org>
To: bitcoin-development@lists•sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] ASIC-proof mining
Date: Fri, 4 Jul 2014 20:38:30 +0000 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <201407042038.30993.luke@dashjr.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAC1+kJOSAoz_BBaFnv4u-Dng7Y4h2tqOHSFRfuKvY87eBR71Gw@mail.gmail.com>
On Friday, July 04, 2014 8:21:42 PM Jorge Timón wrote:
> On 7/4/14, kjj <bitcoin-devel@jerviss•org> wrote:
> > I suspect that there exist no algorithms which cannot be done better in
> > an application-specific device than in a general purpose computer. And
> > if there is such a thing, then it must necessarily perform best on one
> > specific platform, making that platform the de facto application
> > specific device.
> >
> > I'm not sure how one would go about proving or disproving that, but it
> > seems very likely to be true.
>
> I assumed this was obvious and self-evident for anyone who knows what
> a Turing machine is, but judging from the number of smart people
> wasting their time on the pursue of the "anti-ASIC" myth (also known
> as pow wankery) it seems I was wrong.
> Anything you can do with software you can do with hardware and
> viceversa (you can even do it with ropes and fire in Minecraft!!)
> Does this really need any proof?
> I think it's the hard-pow cultists who have to provide a counterexample.
Really, if people want to pursue a goal anything like this, they should be
looking for "ASIC already widely owned" as the property rather than "anti-
ASIC". Thus, a sufficiently memory-hard PoW would really be "RAM is the ASIC".
Whether it's possible to make this or not, is another question. And then we
get back to "is is really a desirable property to have people capable of
mining who have not given any indication of interest?"
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2014-07-04 20:38 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 18+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2014-07-04 10:27 Andy Parkins
2014-07-04 10:53 ` Alan Reiner
2014-07-04 11:08 ` Eugen Leitl
2014-07-04 11:15 ` Andy Parkins
2014-07-04 11:22 ` Alan Reiner
2014-07-04 11:28 ` Andy Parkins
2014-07-04 11:37 ` Gregory Maxwell
2014-07-04 12:01 ` Andy Parkins
2014-07-04 15:20 ` Mike Hearn
2014-07-04 16:50 ` kjj
2014-07-04 18:39 ` Ron Elliott
2014-07-04 19:54 ` Aaron Voisine
2014-07-04 20:21 ` Jorge Timón
2014-07-04 20:38 ` Luke Dashjr [this message]
2014-07-04 20:55 ` Randi Joseph
2014-07-05 8:43 ` Mike Hearn
2014-07-07 0:20 ` Randi Joseph
2014-07-07 6:12 ` Odinn Cyberguerrilla
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