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From: Luke Dashjr <luke@dashjr.org>
To: bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] ASIC-proof mining
Date: Fri, 4 Jul 2014 20:38:30 +0000	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <201407042038.30993.luke@dashjr.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAC1+kJOSAoz_BBaFnv4u-Dng7Y4h2tqOHSFRfuKvY87eBR71Gw@mail.gmail.com>

On Friday, July 04, 2014 8:21:42 PM Jorge Timón wrote:
> On 7/4/14, kjj <bitcoin-devel@jerviss.org> wrote:
> > I suspect that there exist no algorithms which cannot be done better in
> > an application-specific device than in a general purpose computer.  And
> > if there is such a thing, then it must necessarily perform best on one
> > specific platform, making that platform the de facto application
> > specific device.
> > 
> > I'm not sure how one would go about proving or disproving that, but it
> > seems very likely to be true.
> 
> I assumed this was obvious and self-evident for anyone who knows what
> a Turing machine is, but judging from the number of smart people
> wasting their time on the pursue of the "anti-ASIC" myth (also known
> as pow wankery) it seems I was wrong.
> Anything you can do with software you can do with hardware and
> viceversa (you can even do it with ropes and fire in Minecraft!!)
> Does this really need any proof?
> I think it's the hard-pow cultists who have to provide a counterexample.

Really, if people want to pursue a goal anything like this, they should be 
looking for "ASIC already widely owned" as the property rather than "anti-
ASIC". Thus, a sufficiently memory-hard PoW would really be "RAM is the ASIC". 
Whether it's possible to make this or not, is another question. And then we 
get back to "is is really a desirable property to have people capable of 
mining who have not given any indication of interest?"



  reply	other threads:[~2014-07-04 20:38 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 18+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2014-07-04 10:27 [Bitcoin-development] ASIC-proof mining Andy Parkins
2014-07-04 10:53 ` Alan Reiner
2014-07-04 11:08   ` Eugen Leitl
2014-07-04 11:15   ` Andy Parkins
2014-07-04 11:22     ` Alan Reiner
2014-07-04 11:28       ` Andy Parkins
2014-07-04 11:37 ` Gregory Maxwell
2014-07-04 12:01   ` Andy Parkins
2014-07-04 15:20     ` Mike Hearn
2014-07-04 16:50 ` kjj
2014-07-04 18:39   ` Ron Elliott
2014-07-04 19:54     ` Aaron Voisine
2014-07-04 20:21   ` Jorge Timón
2014-07-04 20:38     ` Luke Dashjr [this message]
2014-07-04 20:55     ` Randi Joseph
2014-07-05  8:43       ` Mike Hearn
2014-07-07  0:20         ` Randi Joseph
2014-07-07  6:12           ` Odinn Cyberguerrilla

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