17
votes
Accepted
Approximate cost of developing Cryptonight ASICs
Even FPGA would be expensive for CryptoNight because most standard FPGA have close to zero memory. Your second point will, therefore, not only decrease the relative advantage of ASICs or FPGA over ...
- 463
16
votes
Accepted
Is Monero amenable to ASIC mining?
Cryptonight (the PoW hash used by Monero and most Cryptonote coins) does not lend itself well to ASIC development, for the following reasons:
Cryptonight requires 2 MB of fast memory to work. This ...
- 34.8k
7
votes
Accepted
What exactly has been changed in PoW algorithms in the v7 fork?
In versions 1 to 6 of the protocol, the CryptoNight algorithm was very roughly:
state = keccak(block_data)
scratchpad = fill_scratchpad(state)
loop 524,288 times
address = compute_address(...
- 3,324
6
votes
Accepted
Is Monero really decentralized, if the dev team can easily change the POW algorithm to fight off ASICs so easily?
Centralization is a continuum. Actions and circumstances move a particular system along that continuum.
There are several points which are topical here:
Monero development is made by a smallish ...
- 34.8k
5
votes
Accepted
Monero and ASIC miner
No, not at all. Bitcoin ASICs are designed with the singular purpose of performing Sha-256 hashing - it's literally written in the silicon. Monero uses the Cryptonight hash function which makes use of ...
- 4,393
5
votes
Is Monero amenable to ASIC mining?
Monero is not immune to ASICs in the future, but the costs of manufacturing ASICs is offset by the block rewards such that it would not be profitable. ASIC manufacturing would need to get cheaper, or ...
- 6,484
3
votes
What are the main advantages / disadvantages between proposed RandomX to ProgPoW?
What are the main differences between ProgPOW and RandomX?
The design goal of ProgPoW is to have the algorithm’s requirements match what is available on commodity GPUs, while RandomX is inefficient (...
- 1,621
3
votes
Accepted
How is CryptoNight variant 4 increasing the CPU to ASIC performance ratio?
At block 1788000, Monero will switch PoW from CryptoNight variant 2 to variant 4
The current naming is a little misleading as we are really on variant 3 right now, with the next being variant 4. This ...
- 18.3k
2
votes
How do "Time Locked Proof of Non-ASIC work challenge reward" algorithms work to deter ASIC production?
The idea behind this draft is more like an extension to PoW changes like currently to prevent ASICs overtaking a serious amount of hash rate.
However, it's proposing to time lock all mining rewards ...
- 2,572
2
votes
What was the difference in hashrate power when the March 2018 anti-ASIC Hardfork occurred?
The fork was moved to today (April 6, 2018), so it is hard to tell. Early indications based on block-times are about 80% of the hash-rate is missing. Some of that is non-ASIC miners failing to update ...
- 21
1
vote
Why are I/O bound instructions not used as part of a hashing algorithm to thwart ASICs
"Specialized nodes that act as middlemen" defeats the entire purpose of PoW, which is decentralization.
- 4,233
1
vote
Who created the Monero ASICs during 2019-Jan to 2019-Mar?
Do we know who exactly created these asics during the big hash run up
during 2019-Jan to 2019-Mar?
It's hard to say, but the names are the usual known.
And why would they create these asics, ...
- 1,621
1
vote
What was the difference in hashrate power when the March 2018 anti-ASIC Hardfork occurred?
As of writing this answer (2018-04-07 03:00 UTC), ~18.5 hours after network upgrade, there are 65 blocks mined (latest is 1546065). It takes on average 17 minutes to mine a block, which is 8.5 times ...
- 343
1
vote
What was the difference in hashrate power when the March 2018 anti-ASIC Hardfork occurred?
The network hash rate was around 1123 MH/s at the time of the fork. The difficulty hasn't changed yet, so blocks are coming in much slower(lower hash rate at same "asic difficulty"), and while it ...
- 46
1
vote
Is Monero amenable to ASIC mining?
Bitmain Introduce Cryptonight ASIC
https://shop.bitmain.com/productDetail.htm?pid=000201803132107063379CD35Gxy064F
- 11
1
vote
Is Monero amenable to ASIC mining?
Baikal has delivered an ASIC miner which is for sale on their web site here: http://www.baikalminer.com/product12.php
- 111
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible