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0 pointsjoosters8y ago0 comments

True enough, the graphics cards certainly have alternate uses while a bitcoin miner becomes a very heavy paperweight once the difficulty increases and it turns unprofitable to run.

Your thought process leads to another interesting game theory puzzle: There's a benefit in creating a coin that has a unique proof of work, but as you say, there's also value in letting miners easily switch their existing rigs to mine your coin. I wonder which is actually the best choice?

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Klathmon8y ago

SIA is making the bet that somewhat ASIC friendly algorithms are better off.

The argument being that because ASICs are worthless for anything but mining that one coin, you can really accurately gauge and maintain a hashrate across the whole network. It would be crazy expensive to hoard a bunch of ASICs for a specific algorithm but not run them in hopes to launch a secret 51% attack.

With GPUs that's not really an option. Because GPUs can be used for so much more, it would be easy to see where you could suddenly have a flood of GPU power hit your chain which could be massively over 51% quite easily.

And they could be gone again just as quickly, leaving the remaining users with an impossibly high difficulty and killing off the chain (without a hard-fork to fix it).

It's a fascinating read which actually flipped my opinions on ASICs in favor of them now, I highly recommend it [0].

[0] https://blog.sia.tech/choosing-asics-for-sia-b318505b5b51

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