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Comment by optimiz3 | Hacker News Reader

Some hubris in this post. Claims ASIC resistant PoW is "Solved as far as we can", with Ethash being the near end-all of hashing.

Random-X is a significant step towards ASIC resistance, requiring near general purpose computation to perform efficiently (i.e. if you can build a better CPU than Intel/AMD/ARM, you've already won).

https://github.com/tevador/RandomX/blob/master/doc/design.md

(Random-X requires code JITting, large CPU caches, compliant floating point, SIMD, hardware AES, as well as large amounts of system RAM, and other things.)

Innovation continues. If you stop having ideas, step aside.

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This is what I really dislike about owning crypto long term as a store of value. It's a cat-and-mouse game with hardware and software development, and there's a lot of faith in maintainers to stay ahead of the threats.

>there's a lot of faith in maintainers to stay ahead of the threats.

Isn't that true of basically all software?

Not all software purports to be a store of value

It doesn't have to be a store of value to be critical to fortunes greater than bitcoin wallets, or even life and limb.

Banking software and all the algorithms that power the global economy are vulnerable. Every 10 years or so there's a major crash because of dinne oversight and the result is "this will never happen again", yet it continues to happen again.

At least here we can build an economy off an economic model instead of what we do now which is build an economic model off of the economy.

I‘d rather put my trust in an open source community than in centralized banks.

A fool and his money are soon parted :)

Just wondering, unless you’re doing something illegal or are targeted by the government and your money is at risk of seizure, why would you keep it in crypto with all its associated risks instead of in a bank? Banks are highly regulated and so can’t just run away with your money.

Couple points:

1) If we are talking about central banks such as FED - non-QE QE happening right now in the USA could be good example of why one would not be want to be part of the game.

2) If we are talking about centralized banking as a group of banks operating under the rule of the government - similar question to yours could apply to the general cryptography - why you need it (unless you are a criminal) if the state protects your rights? We seen countless examples where it doesn't quite work like that.

I really want you to consider that desire to not be forced to use the only one available medium of exchange does not mean someone wants to do something illegal (also, try to define illegal in the very general way, that would apply equally in the USA and in Venezuela, and in Russia, and in Somalia =))

> 1) If we are talking about central banks such as FED - non-QE QE happening right now in the USA could be good example of why one would not be want to be part of the game.

Crypto doesn't get you away from this. Not to sound like a mediocre Ashton Kutcher film, but it's all connected. In short, too much fiat, cryto prices in terms of fiat will go up and the converse is true as well.

The only way crypto wins or is THE place to put your money is if the entire world stops using fiat money.

Even more than that - crypto developers can decide they want to have more than 21m (or whatever fixed number) of coins out there changing the whole mechanic of it. But it is one fork away if majority disagree. Try to fork USD.

> Banks are highly regulated and so can’t just run away with your money.

It's not your money in a bank. The bank barely has $1 or two for every $100 you put in. There's plenty of people who have philosophic disagreement with fractional reserve and some who couldn't care less about ethical matters and just there preparing for the worst as good evolutionary diversity dictates they should.

It's easy to sit in a country that hasn't ever suffered these things and think it's all silly, but there's plenty of people who don't have those luxuries. How do you think someone in Cyprus, Zimbabwe or Venezuela would feel about your statement saying to trust the banks? Venezuela was one of the richest countries in the world for a very long time. They still have enormous amounts of mineral wealth and yet people are buying their groceries with wheelbarrows full of money.

I doubt crypto is the solution to these problems that are fundamentally burnt into modern economies now but make no mistake crypto was born out of these problems by a lone developer who virtually everyone ignored. It's easy to criticise until you've walked in those boots for a year suffering at the hands of central banksters.

> How do you think someone in Cyprus, Zimbabwe or Venezuela would feel about your statement saying to trust the banks?

Someone from Zimbabwe here - I endorse their statement: trust the banks. I lost my money to a bank closure in early 00s, eventually got some of it back from the zombie entity that the central bank resuscitated. The CEO of a Zimbabwean crypto-exchange[1] "lost the password" of a cold wallet (wink) a year ago - the deposits therein were lost with no recourse; the exchange is struggling with solvency[2]. So yeah, if you're not going to stuff money under your mattress, give it to a bank before going full crypto.

1. Golix - you might have heard of it as it was offering the world's highest USD:bitcoin rates. The fine print was that you couldn't get USD out of Zimbabwe

2. https://cointelegraph.com/news/ceo-of-zimbabwean-crypto-exch...

That is very unfortunate, you have my sympathy. But I think it has to be pointed out that leaving your money in a crypto-currency exchange is generally considered to be worse than leaving it in a bank, regardless of where you stand on cyptocurrency in general.

Personally, I lost 3 bitcoin when someone hacked my MtGox account in 2012. I think they'd had 2fa for a little while at that point, but I was stupid and didn't enable it. Furthermore, I had reused my account/password on some fledgling bitcoin forum. In my defense, when I made the accounts I didn't think the valuation of bitcoin would peak around $20k :)

> I endorse their statement: trust the banks. I lost my money to a bank closure in early 00s, eventually got some of it back

Solid argument mate. Next you'll tell me that forced land seizures is good for the economy too.

This is bait.

Bitcoin's software development could completely freeze right now, and it would still be useful. Most other projects require constant upgrades and tweaks, since they are very far from the stage they promised when they started. This is especially true for Ethereum.

For context Random-X will soon activate on Monero. It'll be interesting to see how it holds up in the real world.

> Random-X requires code JITting

How can this be a requirement?

The name itself might give you a clue, or just look at the code: https://github.com/tevador/RandomX

Yes, but how can JIT be a requirement, people sufficiently determined could keep the JIT output and then there's no need for it any more.

Each hash input generates a code sequence that has to be executed 1000s of times in an inner loop. The code sequence is different for each input meaning there is no reason to save the JITted code as the next hash will use a new code sequence which you cannot predict.

  data = input;
  for (1..10)
  {
     JITtedCode = CodeGen(CryptographicHash(data));
     for (1..100000)
     {
        data = JITtedCode(data);
     }
     data = CryptographicHash(data);
   }
   output = data;

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