Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] BIP Proposal: Consensus (hard fork) PoST Datastore for Energy Efficient Mining

From: Lonero Foundation <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2021 03:06:32 -0400

The advantage is simple, access to more computational opportunities means a
more scalable network and other reasons, including further options for
optimization. There are also lots of reasons to believe a huge demand of
unmet needs in this space. Why force people to mine Chia if they want to
mine BTC, and why can't highly specialized HPC clusters mine in similar
ways to many of the large ASIC farms? Like I said the design and
implementation needs to be correct for that to work, and I intended to look
towards improving the algo to get the best of both worlds. In regards to
SHA256d, that is an entirely different discussion, but even if one was to
stick to SHA256d for an hashing algo, there are still implementations of
PoW likely more adaptable.

Best regards, Andrew

On Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 2:56 AM ZmnSCPxj <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Good morning Andrew,
>
> > I wouldn't fully discount general purpose hardware or hardware outside
> of the realm of ASICS. BOINC (
> https://cds.cern.ch/record/800111/files/p1099.pdf) implements a decent
> distributed computing protocol (granted it isn't a cryptocurrency), but it
> far computes data at a much cheaper cost compared to the competition w/
> decent levels of fault tolerance. I myself am running an extremely large
> scale open distributed computing pipeline, and can tell you for certain
> that what is out there is insane. In regards to the argument of generic
> HDDs and CPUs, the algorithmic implementation I am providing would likely
> make them more adaptable. More than likely, evidently there would be
> specialized HDDs similar to BurstCoin Miners, and 128-core CPUs, and all
> that. This could be inevitable, but the main point is providing access to
> other forms of computation along w/ ASICs. At the very least, the generic
> guys can experience it, and other infrastructures can have some form of
> compatibility.
>
> What would the advantage of this be?
>
> As I see it, changing the underlying algorithm is simply an attempt to
> reverse history, by requiring a new strain of specialization to be started
> instead of continuing the trend of optimizing SHA256d very very well.
>
> I think it may be better to push *through* rather than *back*, and instead
> spread the optimization of SHA256d-specific hardware so widely that anyone
> with 2 BTC liquidity in one location has no particular advantage over
> anyone with 2 BTC liquidity in another location.
> For one, I expect that there will be fewer patentable surprises remaining
> with SHA256d than any newer, much more complicated construction.
>
> Regards,
> ZmnSCPxj
>