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Re:AMD GPU Supply Exhausted by Crypto Miners, AIBs Now Direc... by wtallis on Monday June 05, 2017 @01:15AM (#14485395)
Some hash functions (eg. scrypt) are designed to make ASIC implementations cost-prohibitive, such as by requiring enough memory that off-chip DRAM working memory is needed. When the memory interface is the bottleneck, an ASIC is not going to offer substantial advantages over GPUs.
Re:AMD GPU Supply Exhausted by Crypto Miners, AIBs Now Direc... by idonotknowwhy on Monday June 05, 2017 @03:21AM (#14485842)
But in the end, we got scrypt ASIC miners anyway. And then a coin called Vertcoin (VTC) came along and replaced scrypt with X11, to fight ASICs
Re:AMD GPU Supply Exhausted by Crypto Miners, AIBs Now Direc... by pygy_ on Monday June 05, 2017 @04:07AM (#14486006)
IIRC the litecoin folks choose bad scrypt parameters, susceptible to custom circuits.
Re:AMD GPU Supply Exhausted by Crypto Miners, AIBs Now Direc... by egeozcan on Monday June 05, 2017 @05:21AM (#14486257)
Does anyone know why they fight ASICs?
Re:AMD GPU Supply Exhausted by Crypto Miners, AIBs Now Direc... by idonotknowwhy on Monday June 05, 2017 @06:07AM (#14486424)
Yeah. Officially it's to avoid centralization. The idea is that anyone can mine the coins, not just rich people with ASIC mining farms.

They also wanted to avoid GPUs originally, and some new altcoins (also known as shitcoins) try to do this as well from time to time. I've been known to either cloud-mine or what I call "Indian-data-center" mine such coins.

I personally like it when a new CPU-only or GPU-only coin comes out because I can mine with my own hardware. My ASIC miner never made ROI before the Bitcoin difficulty got to high that it would never pay back the power bill costs.

Re:AMD GPU Supply Exhausted by Crypto Miners, AIBs Now Direc... by zurn on Monday June 05, 2017 @11:50PM (#14494605)
It would be cool if such "GPU resistant" coins became popular, because it would encourage people to figure out new ways to program GPUs.
Re:AMD GPU Supply Exhausted by Crypto Miners, AIBs Now Direc... by rjsw on Monday June 05, 2017 @06:06AM (#14486417)
Memory controllers are available in most IP collections, there is no reason you can't build one (or more) into an ASIC.