I’m not positive but I thought I saw a post on the forum concerning this but I could not find it. He had no comment on doing anything to stop it, he seemed to be very agreeable with the entire notion.ĭid a market just open up (well, in a year)?Ĭan Feathercoin become ASIC-proof, ASIC-unfriendly, however you want to put it? So Coblee pretty much gave in to the idea of ASIC for scrypt dominating Litecoin in the not to distant future. It’s just not profitable right now with the price of scrypt coins being under $50 dollars. Either way you slice it, the complexity is not insignificant.īut it’s not unachievable either. The alternative to this approach is to build it all into your ASIC design such things are usually referred to as Systems on a Chip (SoC). So while you can design a ASIC that does SHA256 in a fairly straightforward manner simply by keeping everything in local registers, doing so for scrypt presents a different challenge: Either you have to design it with an ungodly amount of registers (good luck writing the firmware for THAT beast), or you equip it with some external RAM (another chip on the board), and in doing so create a whole new set of problems for yourself, because now your ASIC has to talk to the RAM through a controller (another chip on the board). The design of scrypt mandates lots of memory access. It’s a problem because of the memory access required. Real progress in this department would look like making the Proof of Work useful beyond converting kilowatts into heat.įast scrypt mining is a problem even for FPGAs, so don’t expect it soon. I just think that this is a lateral innovation as opposed to progressing the problem. But hey, I’m all for capitalism, and if as a result another industry is born (dedicated scrypt mining hardware) then who am I to complain? It’s just that once it happens, the distinction will be pointless, and we may as well have just stuck with sha256 to begin with… but someone will make a shitton of money in the meantime. All it’s done is create the opportunity for more industry, it hasn’t actually solved the overarching problem in the long run, just put it off by a year. Personally I think it’s a pointless distinction that’s only relevant for another year at best. I’m of the same opinion, which would negate the entire reason why people think scrypt is superior to sha256. The other problem is it’s sha256, not scrypt.
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