Analysis: Mt Gox uncertainty & Where to put miners & shipped scrypt ASICs

gsrcrxsi said:

take this with a grain of salt. they are projecting 3x the power efficiency and 4x the cost efficiency of the DualMiner ASIC. im hard pressed to believe that.

from what i had seen, they are only projecting those numbers based on very small scale. (like the performance of a single chip). im not inclined to believe that it will scale linearly.

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Let's hope not.

Plus, these are just ideas.....for now.

Luke1978 said:

Viper

>=25000kh/s @ <=300w for around 9000 USD + shipping IIRC, This I am watching to see if it actually happens.

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When you start quoting yourself

Luke1978 said:

When you start quoting yourself

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wut?

So , I've got a question about ASICs. If these things start coming out enough so businesses and people can start buying them just as easy as they can buy graphics cards, won't this hurt the value of the coin being mined with them? With hundreds or thousands of those things mining there would be much more coinage out there reducing the value right?

BugFreak said:

So , I've got a question about ASICs. If these things start coming out enough so businesses and people can start buying them just as easy as they can buy graphics cards, won't this hurt the value of the coin being mined with them? With hundreds or thousands of those things mining there would be much more coinage out there reducing the value right?

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Hard to say. Yeah there will be lots of coins, but the price might rise because of this too....

Thousands of people have invested in GPU's for mining, someone will likely make a GPU only coin just because so many put lots of time into GPU rigs.

But if ASICs are flooding the market with coins then graphics cards that cost more to run would become less useful when mining in general. The more something is available the less it will cost and the same could be said for coins. If it is easier to get them them demand goes down and in turn their value. I see ASICs as a bad thing for coinage except for people looking to invest the thousands or millions of dollars IMOG used in his examples. It would basically take the small timer guys like you and me out of the game.

BugFreak said:

But if ASICs are flooding the market with coins then graphics cards that cost more to run would become less useful when mining in general. The more something is available the less it will cost and the same could be said for coins. If it is easier to get them them demand goes down and in turn their value. I see ASICs as a bad thing for coinage except for people looking to invest the thousands or millions of dollars IMOG used in his examples. It would basically take the small timer guys like you and me out of the game.

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with the asics will come higher difficulty, higher diff means its harder to get the coins, which will mean price will go up, admittedly after a bit of a drop first
but ya, asics will ruin us once again .. like they did in btc, only hope is they ship em ups and ups is good at crushing boxes

BugFreak said:

But if ASICs are flooding the market with coins then graphics cards that cost more to run would become less useful when mining in general. The more something is available the less it will cost and the same could be said for coins. If it is easier to get them them demand goes down and in turn their value. I see ASICs as a bad thing for coinage except for people looking to invest the thousands or millions of dollars IMOG used in his examples. It would basically take the small timer guys like you and me out of the game.

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ZL1 said:

with the asics will come higher difficulty, higher diff means its harder to get the coins, which will mean price will go up, admittedly after a bit of a drop first
but ya, asics will ruin us once again .. like they did in btc, only hope is they ship em ups and ups is good at crushing boxes

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You and me both, I'm hanging on by a thread here lol.
I think someone will make a GPU only coin. Someone will make one just because they have $$ in GPU's and they hate ASIC's.

BugFreak said:

So , I've got a question about ASICs. If these things start coming out enough so businesses and people can start buying them just as easy as they can buy graphics cards, won't this hurt the value of the coin being mined with them? With hundreds or thousands of those things mining there would be much more coinage out there reducing the value right?

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no. regardless of how much hashing power is on a network, coins are produced at the same rate as defined by the specifics of the algorithm. thats where difficulty comes in.

say X coin, has a target block rate of 60seconds. that means that the network wants to regulate the network to allow 1 block per minute. and when you add more hashing power to the network, the network reacts by making it harder to find blocks. keeping the find rate at the near constant value of 1 per 60s. if you double the network hashing power, the network reacts by making it twice as hard to find them. the difficulty will retarget based on the

you can only momentarily increase coin production by hammering the network inbetween difficulties (since it wont change the diff until X number of blocks as defined by its algorithm).

so take something like EAC, which retargets after every block. if you slam it with middlecoin's 20GH behemoth, the difficulty will spike after the first block is found. and conversely, with something like Coinye (COYE) which when it launched, had a difficulty retarget time of like 2 weeks (lol) and a starting diff of .002, millions upon millions of coins were generated in just a few hours before the network retargeted.

So basically the difficulty will go higher keeping the value up but the problem of smaller miners getting pushed out still would happen then?

BugFreak said:

So basically the difficulty will go higher keeping the value up but the problem of smaller miners getting pushed out still would happen then?

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in a nutshell

Also, unlike ASIC SHA miners, their are ALOT of different coins you can point scrypt miners at. Just as a supposition, wonder what 54mh/s would get in a day mining Doge, DGC or... Litecoin isnt the most profitable coin to mine, just to convert to for the most part. It is however more stable and reliable, and profit is somewhat predictable barring any major market changes IMHO (all things being relative to the nature of the beast)

Luke1978 said:

in a nutshell

Also, unlike ASIC SHA miners, their are ALOT of different coins you can point scrypt miners at.

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Has anybody actually verified that? I thought the scrypt algorithm was "tuneable" meaning you could change some of the parameters (rounds? memory usage) without changing the underlying code, unlike bitcoin with its fixed sha256 algorithm.

Which would seem to imply that you could make the ASICs useless without much effort? Possibly even without a new coin?

I don't know much about the underlying code and I'm not a hardware designer so I don't know how big of a factor this is, but I have this nagging feeling that scrypt ASICs aren't going to be a simple solution.

I hope somebody more knowledge than me can weigh in on this.

The_Programer said:

Has anybody actually verified that? I thought the scrypt algorithm was "tuneable" meaning you could change some of the parameters (rounds? memory usage) without changing the underlying code, unlike bitcoin with its fixed sha256 algorithm.

Which would seem to imply that you could make the ASICs useless without much effort? Possibly even without a new coin?

I don't know much about the underlying code and I'm not a hardware designer so I don't know how big of a factor this is, but I have this nagging feeling that scrypt ASICs aren't going to be a simple solution.

I hope somebody more knowledge than me can weigh in on this.

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What I mean is, you can mine Doge, DGC, ANC, 42coin, mooncoin..... with a scrypt miner. Just change the server address and port. So even though these scrypt ASIC's are aimed at LTC, that doesnt mean you cant mine something else and then convert to the coin of your choice.

Which translates to... less of an impact on individual coins, BUT should see an increase in LTC trade volume when these things catch on.

Could change the memory requirements per thread - currently it is 128KB. If it were changed, it would be a hard swap and everyone would have to upgrade or the block chain would fork.

everyone, hi.

moho said:

face it. if scrypt asics come out en masse, someone/everyone wont go and dump all their mining hardware, especially if they spend a good amount of time/money on them. There will be a new algo , that most/all miners move to. then lets hope LTC prices skyrocket.

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would other scrypt coins also skyrocket in price? if so, i hope they reach around 0.0004 btc value. i have allot of new coins that are worth around 100-200 satoshi.

I don't see skyrocketing prices from ASICs, maybe there's something I'm missing tho.

It would impact more than the main coins however, as it would allow getting massive amounts of low difficulty coins if I'm right about scrypt ASICs attracting business investment in mining hardware.

(G{in}[AK)TION] said:

everyone, hi.



would other scrypt coins also skyrocket in price? if so, i hope they reach around 0.0004 btc value. i have allot of new coins that are worth around 100-200 satoshi.

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I hope so. I'm keeping my eye on DGC, I'm sitting on 30 DGC so when the price goes up, selling time

Not to hijack the thread, but while we are on the topic:

Is anyone here considering putting a deposit on those 5M or 25M Viper models?? I mean even if the power consumption quadruple what they expect, that is still extremely power efficient and the hash rate per dollar is very good. Not trying to play devil's advocate, but if you had a spare $2200 lying around, would you build a rig or buy the 5Mh/s model?

Radeon28 said:

Not to hijack the thread, but while we are on the topic:

Is anyone here considering putting a deposit on those 5M or 25M Viper models?? I mean even if the power consumption quadruple what they expect, that is still extremely power efficient and the hash rate per dollar is very good. Not trying to play devil's advocate, but if you had a spare $2200 lying around, would you build a rig or buy the 5Mh/s model?

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I'd still build a rig...

Build a rig.

I'm a skeptical cynic when it comes to things like that, and I'm also pathologically conservative when considering risk... You can't even work out an expected financial return or payoff period with a prepayment on a device that hasn't been demonstrated and no indication of factual support for a delivery timeframe.

I nope right out at that point, though I accept it may pay off for some people. I'd rather go with a well calculated position with near certainty of returns.