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Comment by password1 | Hacker News Reader

These numbers are really low, I think I'm missing something otherwise I don't understand why 51% aren't a common issue.

Those prices are derived from a site called NiceHash that tries to commodify hashpower. Most people who want to monetize their mining hardware, just... use it to mine, not lease it to a reseller. So both the supply and demand are low. It's a weird market imo.

The last column is important to understand. It's answering the question: if you rented NiceHash's entire supply of compute power, how close would that get you to launching an attack? For any crypto worth caring about, the number is 0% or close to it. And for the others where it's >= 100%, attacks are a common issue for exactly this reason.

It is a common issue. ETC was 51'd 3 times in a month not too long ago... that said, with the upcoming merge, it'll soon be the largest hash GPU/ASIC coin.

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2020/08/29/ethereum-classic...

If I recall, the problem was that they were using the same PoW function as etherium was, so people could just use their old ETH hardware to attack ETC. Pretty sure the fix was to switch to a slightly different PoW that entails re-designing the ASICs.

Except they never switched.

For security reasons, there can only be one top coin per class of hardware.

sha256/bitcoin = asic

ethash/ethereum = gpu

randomx/xmr= cpu

Yes, there are ethash asics, but they are effectively just asic gpus with ram... the memory controller is the gating factor because ethash is memory hard [1].

The gpu balance will shift with the merge... all the hash will go to ETC and other shitcoins. $21m a day in rewards will go to $1.2m a day.

A lot of GPUs will be turning off as the profitability drops. As profit drops, large miners will sell to the retail market to cover their costs...

ETC will trend towards zero... miners will try other coins, but those will also trend to zero since they have no actual use (utility) other than speculation.

These next couple weeks are going to be fascinating to watch. This merge is not only the end of ETH mining, but it could also be the end of speculation profit for a lot of other (shit)coins.

[1] https://www.vijaypradeep.com/blog/2017-04-28-ethereums-memor...

Interesting, thank you for clearing this up.

However, I think you could have multiple competing cryptocurrencies in the ASIC class, because the ASICs are not as generic as GPUs or CPUs, so they cannot be easily repurposed for attack unless they are FPGA-based (doubful).

Anyways, I'm looking forwards to the new supply of GPUs. Hopefully we don't get the same thing again with Chia hogging up all the storage on the market or Monero hogging up all the CPUs.

Correct, asic's could have multiple, but in reality, don't. There is litecoin with scrypt. I was the 3rd largest scrypt miner there for a while. But these are all speculation coins without any solid utility. Nobody is going to build asics for coins that don't have demand. We saw this happen with Grin coin.

Another little tidbit for you... GPU mining didn't really impact the supply as much as people like to talk it up in the press. Maybe for a short while, but it was more just a lack of manufacturing than anything.

Because ethash is memory hard, older (4-5 year old) gpus are actually the most ROI profitable. It isn't the same nm hardware race as asics. People buying up the most expensive GPUs for mining were not helping themselves at all.

CPU based mining is kind of a shit show... less about people buying CPUs and more about bot networks being used to mine.

> But these are all speculation coins without any solid utility. Nobody is going to build asics for coins that don't have demand. We saw this happen with Grin coin.

Not only is Grin the one coin, out of many thousands, that strongly deters speculation with its pure linear emission, but it did in fact have ASICs built for it (the Ipollo G1/G1-mini).

Heh, hi tromp, you must have a grin filter? ;-)

I still stand by what I said... grin doesn't have any demand (the price is in the dumps and it has no utility)... nobody is going to pay $9k for an asic to earn pennies. how many of those things have people actually bought?

Despite its anti-speculative emission, Grin still has more demand than all but 25 PoW coins [1] and a G1-mini ASIC miner costs as little as $289. Since 1 miner does about 1.2G/s the overall graph rate of 8830 G/s suggests about 7360 of these have been bought.

[1] https://www.f2pool.com/coins

No wonder the price is so low... all the miners just dumping on retail in order to make their capex back.

I appreciate that you tried to make a coin and that your algo is actually pretty interesting... but it is also too bad you didn't do a memory hard algo and be in a position to capture the 18m+ GPUs that are about to need a new home.

Many miners are not selling (dumping is when you unload your big premine, which Grin doesn't have), which is why there is limited liquidity on the few exchanges that list Grin. I The Cuckoo Cycle PoW family is memory hard and Grin supported GPU mining in its first two years, but long term everything turns to ASICs...

How would you know who's selling and who isn't? Given the limited liquidity, it would have to be miners since that is the only way to get it. I use the word dumping to mean that they are mining and selling.

ethash held out surprisingly well. certainly a lot of asics were sold, but it didn't fully knock out GPUs like say sha256 did with btc. where as grin... you changed your original tone on it and decided to embrace asics with specific changes to CC to support that.

Yes, it's pretty much only miners selling, but only a small fraction of them sell on exchanges as apparent from the low volumes.

The original Cuckoo Cycle turned out to be rather ASIC friendly; the Cuckatoo variant even more so. But it's the Cuckaroo variants that saw the most changes to make them substantially more ASIC resistant.

Where else would they sell?

They don't. They have the funds for the electricity (which are rather modest compared to other coins) and just accumulate Grin...

So then that explains the price being as low as it is... nobody is actually using it... just sitting on it in the hopes that it might go up some day. Sigh.

update: removed comment about ROI cause I didn't do the full maths.

> So then that explains the price being as low as it is... nobody is actually using it

That comment makes no sense, since most cryptocurrencies have no use except speculation. The price is low (well, no lower than Doge) because Grin deters speculation, and hence much fewer people are willing to speculate on it.

> ROI is 4300+ days

Based on what electricity price?

> not counting the 'modest' power usage.

That's just how much electricity it will cost you to sustain the attack for 1 hour. You still need to find the hardware. You'll also need to find someone to accept your transaction (that needs to be bigger than those 2 costs combined to make it profitable) and give you cash in return. Then you can defraud them keeping the cash and coins by reversing the transaction.

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