There's absolutely 0 innovation in creating new hardware for Bitcoin mining: the only thing that stop us from having it is the economies of scale. Please stop mistaking one for another.

I think bias is making you more unfair than you need to be.

I think he's being fair. The real difficulty in making an ASIC is justifying the huge price to start production. The good old "the first chip is worth $10 millions, the second is worth $5" or something like that.

Designing a bitcoin mining IP is not exactly difficult, it's basically two rounds of SHA-256. It's still some work of course, but as far as ASICs are concerned it's very low on the difficulty scale.

The "innovation" here obviously isn't in the "cutting edge technology that moves the state of the art forward" at all.

The innovation at the time was that the conventional wisdom that it's "effectively impossible" to do small custom ASIC runs for relatively cheap. Most were laughed at back then when this topic was brought up for other use cases.

While I'm sure none of that was super exciting to someone who works on custom ASIC design for some enterprise, it was pretty neat watching effectively a bunch of hackers figure the process out and do it for a tenth of the predicted "first chip" costs. This has a lot of value in of itself, simply proving something is possible for $a_lot_of_money+skill vs. $epic_truckloads_of_money.

Nowadays it's not super interesting since you're back to needing to be a "big player" to get into the game - but for a year or so it was a real fun time to be a bystander and watch the rapid pace of development.

It took much less money than that to develop the first Bitcoin ASICs.

~150k USD for 130nm, 200-300k USD for 110nm, and ~500k USD for 65nm, as of 2013 http://blog.zorinaq.com/asic-development-costs-are-lower-tha...

I doubt that 65nm would be able to beat a GPU (which are all 16nm class or better) at the task however. If you make an ASIC but if the $3000 Titan V is more power efficient anyway, then you've wasted your time and money.

65nm and other "old node" designs primarily are about mass-manufacturing a design. They probably can beat an FPGA in cost and margins once mass produced. But for performance and power-efficiency, you gotta be way better. Maybe 28nm or 22nm class or better to beat the GPUs (or even standard CPUs like EPYC and the SHA256 accelerators built into it)

Also, you gotta beat your competition. If someone else makes a 10nm-class BTC ASIC (https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/31/samsung-confirms-asic-chip...), then your 28nm or 22nm design is obsolete.

A 65nm or even 130nm Bitcoin ASIC handily beats a 16nm GPU at mining, in terms of perf per watt and perf per dollars. And by handily I mean 1 or 2 orders of magnitude.

> it's basically two rounds of SHA-256.

There's a bit more to this; there's clever optimisations you can do (based on the Merkle–Damgård structure of SHA256 and the format/semantics of the data being hashed): http://www.mit.edu/~jlrubin/public/pdfs/Asicboost.pdf

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.00575.pdf

Yeah I conveniently avoided to talk about that, but this is more like exploiting a weakness in the bitcoin protocol, it wasn't really meant to be feasible (and made many people angry when it was patented). That is innovation however, I grant you that.

You could support that by pointing out what you feel the actual innovations involved in Bitcoin hardware are.

Faith routing, amongst those who are underserved or disenchanted with incumbent faith routing providers.

Could you elaborate on that? I've never heard the term and Googling isn't being helpful.

https://www.google.com/search?q="faith+routing"+bitcoin

https://www.google.com/search?q="faith+routing"+cryptocurren...

If you replace "innovations" with "behaviors" you're on to something.

OP is catching flak for the comment, but Filecoin and others are doing cool things exploring the possibilities of using incentives to drive massive resource re-allocations.

Innovations?