Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah but their strategy on that seems kinda dumb to me because it either does nothing or has a negative effect on the ecosystem. If someone wants to mine bitcoin on their own CPU they can, and if my PC has enough hash power to find a coin on a blockchain then let me tell you, that chain has real problems and is not a serious player. That amount of computing power doesn't justify paying any interesting amount of money.

It isn't the biggest technical concern and at least they have principles, but I expect something that looks like Monero + easy to mine will eventually appear and turn out to have an advantage in the real world. Although it is hard to predict because it isn't completely clear what (if any) impact the algorithm difficulty has in practice. But if there are big datacentre mining a cryptocurrency with dedicated hardware then that means there are people with skin in the game who want it to succeed. Seems like a better equilibrium than whatever the Monero people are aiming for.

Like Monero but easy to mine is Monero. A Monero mining ASIC is called a CPU, by design.

Or do you mean higher block rewards? Don't worry, the value of the coin automatically adjusts to nullify that.

> Like Monero but easy to mine is Monero. A Monero mining ASIC is called a CPU, by design.

That is the "does nothing" argument. But compared to Bitcoin, having a general-purpose [0] ASIC seems like it'd make the network less secure - if someone wants to run something like a 51% attack against Bitcoin they first have to buy a ridiculous amount of specialist Bitcoin-only hardware that will potentially lose all its value after a successful attack. Also probably be a lot easier to track who did it.

Monero the equilibriums are less obvious. Does that matter? No, I don't think so, I still own a certain amount. But it isn't a helpful axis to experiment on and I don't see where the upside is meant to come from vs just going with sha.

[0] Edited, was special-purpose.

What do you mean compared to Bitcoin? Bitcoin has special-purpose ASICs and Monero does not.

Oh yes, sorry. General purpose. I edited the comment.

There are no general-purpose ASICs, it's like saying a hot ice cube.

You're the one who called a CPU an ASIC. Seems pretty general purpose, it's a Turing machine simulator.

And hot ice cubes are a thing. They've made ice at up to 650K if the wiki phase diagram is any indicator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phase_diagram_of_water.sv...

Do you understand why Monero's mining algorithm is designed the way it is? If you design a chip to be optimal for mining Monero, you create a shitty CPU that performs 2% better than an ordinary CPU at mining Monero. You may as well use an ordinary CPU to mine Monero, because it can do other things too.

Well, yes. I do. Why do you want to consider mining Monero with a shitty custom CPU? That's a bit of a non-sequitur and I don't see the relevance to the thread. We've been in furious agreement on that point for about 4 posts now and I'm not sure where you're trying to go with it.

I'm going to reiterate that you are the one who started calling a CPU an ASIC, I'm was just trying to match your language to be friendly. A CPU is technically as ASIC for a certain class of computable functions, so if you want to call it that I'm happy to as well. If you don't want to call it an ASIC we don't have to, we can just call it a CPU.

To repeat what apparently caused you to start this stupid argument:

> A Monero mining ASIC is called a CPU, by design.

This is true. If you make a Monero mining ASIC, then you have made a shitty CPU. Off-the-shelf CPUs are the best possible chips for mining Monero with, and this is by design.

The Monero hash function works by generating random programs and then running them, so that you need to have a CPU to generate hashes, and all of the optimisations in a CPU benefit Monero hashing. If you build a chip that does this, you have built a CPU. It's even built so that the instruction set is irrelevant, because the same program is run thousands of times before a new one is generated, making the overhead of translating it to any needed instruction set negligible.

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