Good morning Andrew, > I wouldn't fully discount general purpose hardware or hardware outside of the > realm of ASICS. BOINC (https://cds.cern.ch/record/800111/files/p1099.pdf) > implements a decent distributed computing protocol (granted it isn't a > cryptocurrency), but it far computes data at a much cheaper cost compared to > the competition w/ decent levels of fault tolerance. I myself am running an > extremely large scale open distributed computing pipeline, and can tell you > for certain that what is out there is insane. In regards to the argument of > generic HDDs and CPUs, the algorithmic implementation I am providing would > likely make them more adaptable. More than likely, evidently there would be > specialized HDDs similar to BurstCoin Miners, and 128-core CPUs, and all > that. This could be inevitable, but the main point is providing access to > other forms of computation along w/ ASICs. At the very least, the generic > guys can experience it, and other infrastructures can have some form of > compatibility.
What would the advantage of this be? As I see it, changing the underlying algorithm is simply an attempt to reverse history, by requiring a new strain of specialization to be started instead of continuing the trend of optimizing SHA256d very very well. I think it may be better to push *through* rather than *back*, and instead spread the optimization of SHA256d-specific hardware so widely that anyone with 2 BTC liquidity in one location has no particular advantage over anyone with 2 BTC liquidity in another location. For one, I expect that there will be fewer patentable surprises remaining with SHA256d than any newer, much more complicated construction. Regards, ZmnSCPxj _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
