Litecoin [LTC] X11 hardfork at block 564,480 | Hacker News Reader

Litecoin [LTC] X11 hardfork at block 564,480

bitcointalk.org

31 pointssidko74 comments

> We don't need the Litecoin developers. > We need the majority to support this to make this hardfork work.

This is a pretty interesting comment from the person who is proposing the fork. I wonder how the currency will split if a sizable amount of people switch to this method of mining? Will the devs be forced to accept their fork or will this just split off into a litecoin 2.0 that is ASIC resistant which previously mined coins grandfathered into this new fork

Either outcome could happen. The devs can stick with the old fork, they can move to the new one. To my knowledge there's no reason 2 litecoin networks can't exist at the same time, aside from being inconvenient & confusing.

Could this lead to double spend scenerios? For example, I have 10 LTC on the current system and these guys fork to form a new network. Can I then spend the 10 LTC I have twice, once on their new network and once on the old network?

Isn't it just a matter of time that someone will make ASICs also for X11? To me any type of algorithm can eventually be implemented in an ASIC. Perhaps some algorithms take longer than others, but it's just a matter of time.

They mentioned in the thread that this will indeed happen. But it will take at least 1.5-2 years at which point they just want to change the algo again.

See: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=549572.msg5981748#ms...

ASIC inevitability is a falsehood. Software can be modified very quickly, whereas hardware requires much longer development cycles. Software can always outpace hardware, if the community is willing to commit to ASIC resistance by changing the software.

That's why FPGAs exist

And I'm sure existing ASICS can be adapted to new algorithms, they're developed in VHDL/Verilog, surely, not as easily as changing an FPGA, still, it won't be a work from scratch.

They have to be build though, which is expensive. If the hashing algorithm is parameterized by the block number in some smart way it will be harder to deploy them. For example, one could use 10 different algorithms and choose a new one every block. The ASIC will only work 10% of the time but this can be implemented on the GPU.

I agree that FPGA resistance is much harder to achieve.

Give me a break. FPGAs aren't even useful for Scrypt (due to memory bandwidth requirements, as I understand it).

ASICs have to go through a manufacturing cycle. Software doesn't. It is plainly obvious that software can move faster than hardware.

The only way to exclude FPGAs from mining a cryptocurrency is to create a problem that requires the average FPGA to completely (not partially) self-reconfigure faster than the average FPGA's configuration time in order to be competitive. Either that or somehow create a problem that requires more LUTs and logic cells than an FPGA is capable of supplying. But then you could just make multiple FPGAs work together. So you'd need some kind of latency based problem to make it difficult for multiple FPGAs to work together.

Has anybody tried looking at making GPUs do what they are designed for? Namely sorting and rasterizing triangles. If a cryptocurrency was made to use a very large number of triangles as the problem, perhaps GPUs would be the most efficient device to solve it with.

FPGA's rule themselves out. You can use them for prototyping your ASIC, but FPGA's are extremely costly per silicon area, and generally less power efficient than anything else.

Oh, and nobody is using triangles because hashing lends itself so well to Proof-of-Work. The "work" must be difficult to perform, but very easy to verify. Like a zip file that takes 20 minutes to compress, but only 5 seconds to unzip. To verify a triangle you would have to re-render it.

The way to achieve ASIC,FPGA and even GPU resistance is to require many GB of memory. Better yet, random access to many GB of memory. Then your performance is limited by memory latency. This is what I designed Cuckoo Cycle (https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo) for.

Yesterday something about Auroracoin (never heard of it before), now Litecoin is undergoing some big change, and meanwhile the value of my bitcoins went down 10% overnight. Can anyone explain to me what is happening? Why does anyone care about Auroracoin and a Litecoin protocol change and why does it drive another cryptocurrency's value down?

I'd assume that some people are unable to cash out of Auroracoin directly, so they dumped AUR for BTC before people on the crypto markets were aware of what was happening.

This didn't drive the price of BTC up, but when they cashed out into USD it drove the price of BTC down.

Alternatively, the events might not be related. Cryptos are very volatile.

* Apparently the Auroracoin thing was actually a planned fork.

* This Litecoin thing appears to be some random person with no authority trying to make stuff happen.

* Bitcoin price is falling because news is claiming banks in China must close all accounts related to bitcoin-businesses by April 15th. I don't know if it's true or not, but I'm not panic-selling my coins.

Thanks!

I don't see what the point of this is? ASICs are actually good; they perform the necessary proof of work while using a lot less power. Running all those GPUs is a needless waste.

It sounds like this is just some GPU owners wanting to turn back time to protect their assets.

I guess the idea is to let a regular Joe to mine some coins too, so that he doesn't have to invest a few grands.

If we're going to do that, why not get rid of GPUs, too. ASICs are merely an efficiency increase, just like GPUs were.

I somehow suspect, however, the proponents of this change are not "regular joes", who might have an intel HD2000 in their laptop. And if we're going to play the "democratising" card, with GPU mining it's a lottery of where you happen to live - electricity prices vary wildly around the globe. ASICs help to take that out of the equation, so if anything they're more "democratic"!

yes, ASICs have finally brought the altcoin game within reach of the world's poor.

As much as $2000 GPU mining boxes have? To go with their 50c+/kwh electricity prices? Yes, yes they have.

As I discussed in another comment, we could get rid of GPUs too, but first you have to find a suitable algorithm that works well on CPUs but not GPUs or any conceivable ASIC. That may or may not exist.

the energy usage of bitcoin and the altcoins is, in my opinion, one of the few things that could threaten its viability long term. people aren't going to be able to understand the reasoning that this is the cost of decentralization - it's going to look like a phenomenal waste of energy, even if low-powered ASICs are doing most of the work. not that the average consumer has a problem with that, but govts might.

i wonder if there is a solution to the byzantine general's problem with that is resistant to 50% malicious nodes but doesn't require so much energy overhead. even proof-of-stake coins still require energy wasting.

> people aren't going to be able to understand the reasoning that this is the cost of decentralization

As compared to entire blocks of office high-rises in every major city required for our current financial system?

Or people carving up the crust of the Earth looking for a shiny rock in yesteryears.

Though it is worth mentioning there are cryptocurrencies looking to solve this problem, like peercoin's proof of stake.

Well, commercial organizations that own office space are already forming and expanding around BitCoin - so the cost of keeping those businesses physically open would be in addition to the cost of keeping the BitCoin network up and running. It's not like we're getting rid of the need for buildings.

You also have to look at the cost of the conventional banking system, fees and periodic capital destruction by inflation, bailouts and malinvestment.

ASICS centralize the power in the network to people with five to six figures of capital. GPU mining is more accessible and keeps the hashing power distributed.

Also, don't fool yourself on power efficiency. The network adjusts the difficulty, so if ASICS are 100x as power efficient the difficulty will tend towards 100x harder.

I've seen some mining rooms which disprove your notion that GPU-only mining will stop the capitalised players having an advantage. They always will.

And yes, it's always a balancing act. The network adjusts the difficulty based on total hashrate, not on power efficiency, which is just an overhead. More and more people will pile in until the difficulty is high enough to render mining unviable. However, ASICs at least will shift the balance more towards hardware costs vs the raw power cost that it is now, and reduce the number of useless components that need to be manufactured, etc.

The difference is if those with capital have a linear scaling of power in the mining or if there is a sheer cliff followed by linear growth, because without an ASIC you can't effectively mine at all.

Everyone has a GPU, and your gpu is usually on the same magnitude of efficiency (assuming its modern) as the optimal GPU miner for any given algorithm. With ASICs, the barrier to entry is huge, so you have less "casual" miners. The casual miners significantly dilute the power of concentrated mining operations.

Capital still begets capital, but with GPU mining at least you don't have to have five figures just to get into the game.

ASICS are actually good

False. Mining difficulty automatically adjusts to compensate for faster hardware. Nothing is gained.

Increased efficiency is generally beneficial in non-zero-sum games, but cryptocurrency mining is actually a zero-sum game where increased efficiency does not add value anywhere.

> Nothing is gained.

Well, where's the gain from mandating GPUs?

> increased efficiency does not add value anywhere

Back to CPUs, then?

GPUs are ubiquitous. When you have optimizations of hashing algorithms, like for scrypt and sha1 before it, you end up with specialized hardware often coming out of a few hardware companies dominating the entire mining scene.

That means a stark concentration of mining power, because it means "average joe shmoe" can't just start running cgminer on their integrated openCL hardware and get coins at reasonable rates for the money invested (in power).

I think it is too late for litecoin, and would rather see them implement this in a less entrenched altcoin like peercoin, because there is too much inertia and scale now to change it in the litecoin space.

I understand and agree with, to some extent, the argument against centralisation. However, I don't see how this fork solves it - it's switching from one form of centralisation (ASICs) to another (huge clusters of mining rigs).

GPUs may be ubiquitous but it's not viable to run a mining rig with just one, which means that all those GPU miners are basically running "specialised hardware" too. Joe schmoe does not just happen to have an 8-GPU tower computer lying around.

I run a 2-GPU tower and make a couple bucks a day with zero upkeep effort on my part.

It's not totally vanilla hardware like the 15-watt laptop I'm typing this on, but it is common enough I happened to have it already.

With ASICs the barrier to entry is five figures. (Most of the cheaper ASICs have terrible payoff timelines) With GPUs the barrier to entry is far, far lower. You won't make it rich on a $150 GFX card, but you can make some revenue.

Yes, why not a PoW that's all of

ASIC resistant

GPU resistant

botnet resistant

My Cuckoo Cycle PoW (https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo) configured to require for instance 7GB of memory, is all of the above. And is very power friendly, since only 5% of the runtime is computation and 95% is waiting for main memory random access latency...

I am not sure that GPUs are "mandated" so much as they are in the sweet spot of flexibility to run different algorithms, and high performance.

Back to CPUs, then?

Sure, if you can come up with a good proof-of-work algorithm that runs well only on CPUs.

It could be possible. The straightforward way would be, I believe, to use an algorithm that has weak parallelism and depends strongly on branching. CPUs are king of branching, and both GPUs and ASICs get ahead by taking advantage of parallelism.

Although, one nice thing about GPUs being the standard-bearer, is it makes most general purpose server hardware useless for mining. That's good in that it makes hijacking a webserver to mine bitcoins, a largely pointless affair.

What I don't get is what's with those hundreds of alt coins. Sometimes I get a feeling that people who missed the BTC growth are just trying to make up for it by creating their own coin. I understand that people are passionate about it and all, but it makes much more sense to have a few coins with plenty of people working on it rather than a new coin popping up every week, and being forgotten a few weeks later.

It's like everyone would fork Linux kernel, make some adjustment and try to promote it as something new rather than doing a pull request.

Or, like everyone was writing their own blogging engines after WP's success.

> Sometimes I get a feeling that people who missed the BTC growth are just trying to make up for it by creating their own coin.

Which is true in 95% of cases.

Competition between crypto currencies isn't undesirable to early BTC adopters. You may be right that some people who missed the train just want to make one of their own in order to get rich in the ramp-up phase.

It's confusing now, but I think eventually having hundreds or even thousands of crypto currencies will contribute to their stability. Hopefully, we'll eventually have an abstraction layer on top of all these coins that can maintain a balanced portfolio of "value" in your wallet.

There is a lot of nonsense, but there are also some fascinating ideas being tested out. For example I hope that "Proof of Stakes" instead of "Proof of Work" can succeed, because I dislike the waste of energy that comes with Bitcoin mining. Then there are differing distribution models, or the "encode a contract" approaches. Anonymity is another interesting field.

As I write this,the market cap for all crytocurrencies is $7.22bn. $5.6bn of that is Bitcoin, $900m is Ripple, $340m is Litecoin, and the remaining ~$400m is the remaining 205 currencies with enough of a presence to be traded on exchanges. A lot of money, for sure, but it's really a drop in the bucket compared to Bitcoin, (Ripple), and Litecoin. If you look at daily volume, get rid of Ripple and add Dogecoin.

Some of the CC's try totally new ideas. For example, litecoin uses scrypt instead of bitcoin's sha. Another coin uses Proof of Stake instead of Proof of Work. These aren't simple bug fixes, these are fundamental differences of philosophy on how the network should work. Hence the forks.

But, yes, there are some "me too" CC's.

What is X11?

It is a combination of hashing algo's[1]: "X11 consists of the following algorithms: blake, bmw, groestl, jh, keccak, skein, luffa, cubehash, shavite, simd, and echo."

[1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/21bely/have_...

Yeah that's the only thing I found about it, but who created this, where is the specifications, tests, etc.

This looks like someone took many different hash functions and for some reason thinks it's "anti-ASIC"...

I wonder how long it will take before people start using Proof-of-Stake coins, which don't have the ASIC mining issues at all. (Naturally, because "mining" with Proof-of-Stake is not a competition of processing power)

There are still problems with proof-of-stake being more manipulable and fork-prone: the incentives to converge on a single consensus are much lower. (Search for ["proof of stake" "nothing at stake"] for some related discussion.)

Why not use Primecoin or Riecoin algorithms? Those won't work on GPUs/ASICS either and produce some actual scientific value.

Only two downsides:

1) The existing algorithms for finding prime chains or clusters are rather involved, and people may keep superior algorithms private.

2) They're not very botnet-resistant.

Point #1 is actually kind of exciting to me.

Yes, as an algorithm designer myself, I can see the attraction:-) I'd make a bad competitive miner though, as I'd be too eager to publish my optimizations, and get some recognition for that...

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=altcoin+pumps

I guess that means the (tiny) amount of LTC I own has just doubled.

so this hardforks into a new currency and you can still sell LTC on an exchange which still supports it. Sounds like built in double spent.

That won't happen, the exchange will be on only one of the two branches and thus will only accept transactions on that branch. So double spends are not possible unless the exchanges switches branch at some future time.

There's nothing stopping an exchange from offering LTC and LTC X11. Once the fork happens, there will be two clients on separate block chains.

I guess when this fork happens, I'll have a handful of LTC X11, and I guess I'll dump them for BTC at whatever bargain price they're selling for, as I can't imagine how this could end well.

>a new currency

That's the answer to your question. It really is a new currency, but everyone with Litecoins gets an amount of the new currency equal to their Litecoin stake.

After that, Litecoin and Litecoin X11 are separate entities, which will not have the same price. Possibly Litecoin X11 will be worthless, if it doesn't get much support. Like any digital currency of this kind, it will be worth whatever people are willing to pay for it. Exchanges will have to opt in to accept Litecoin X11, as a separate currency from Litecoin.

Or, if the buy-in is significant, Litecoin goes the way of the DoDo and Litecoin X11 replaces it under the Litecoin moniker.

That's possible, although it's less likely because if the X11 fork won, then there's a chance the project would lose the original Litecoin developers.

That would be very disruptive, and would probably pull the price down, and that is a risk which may deter some people from using the X11 fork.

How can that site break so much on mobile devices/small screens, wth completely unreadable. How do they do that escape from view effect?

I don't know what's the X11 protocol, but to think a protocol can be "ASIC resistant" looks naive

Scrypt has a bigger memory footprint, but ASICs can work with more memory, no problem

Not to mention decreasing mineability may end up isolating their fork (causing their value to go down)

The point of scrypt isn't really to be "ASIC-resistant", but to make it much more expensive to build ASICs to efficiently reverse its outputs.

I haven't heard any explanation why this would be so

Ok, this explains a little bit about X11 http://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/21bely/have_...

But whatever a GPU can do, a properly designed ASIC can do as well

It seems they're counting on implementation time for new ASICs for this algorithm.

Indeed. They seem to be switching out and tunable unpredictable memory access (i.e. have to spend a lot of money building an ASIC with a lot of die area -- see the scrypt paper to understand why: https://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt/scrypt.pdf) for a faster but more "obfuscated" construction. The circuit needed to implement this will be more complex, but it will be much cheaper to mass-produce.

In short, this is what happens when people who know nothing about cryptography try to sell their unexamined constructions.

>>I don't know what's the X11 protocol, but to think a protocol can be "ASIC resistant" looks naive.

Maybe you shouldn't claim something to be naive when you don't know anything about it?

Do you know what an ASIC is?

Please tell me what computation can be done in a GPU that can't be done in a specifically designed ASIC.

Note the poster said "ASIC resistant" not "ASIC proof".

Kind of like a pub/priv key is not uncrackable - just that the resources required to crack it are excessive enough that almost nobody can attempt it and get meaningful results. Maybe x11 requires something that would make ASICs very expensive to produce or maybe some kind of legal loophole where shipping ASICs, rather than GPUs, implementing the algo is a legal problem in target countries.

I'm not saying I support the poster; frankly I'm just ignoring it until it comes from someone with authority. At the same time, I'm not writing this person off as naive until it is shown why x11-ASICs would be just as legal, simple & cost-effective as any other cryptocoin ASICs out there. I also realize that one could look at this from the other side and leave the burden of proof on the poster. He/She needs to show why an x11-asic would be hard to produce because of cost and/or legality.

So... I'm neutral, but with a -0.01 since this doesn't look to be anyone of significant importance in LTC community.

| ASICs can work with more memory, no problem

Up to a point. When you need more memory than fits on a single chip, you have to incur off-chip delays in accessing memory. Basically your ASIC is now just an application specific manycore CPU that needs to interface to commodity DRAM. At which point it may not have much advantage over commodity CPUs...

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