News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:What Satoshi Did Not Know (2015) [pdf] by bawolff on Saturday September 05, 2020 @02:29AM (#24381743)
Other posts have pointed out that he did forsee that. However if we want to prevent specialized hardware from taking over, we do have a very easy solution in the form of memory-hard hash functions like scrypt or argon2. These didn't exist back in the day, but its a very trivial change to the bitcoin model (and thrre are coins that use these) so its not like this represents some fundamental architecture failure in bitcoin.
Re:What Satoshi Did Not Know (2015) [pdf] by tromp on Saturday September 05, 2020 @06:55AM (#24382715)
Memory hard PoW doesn't prevent specialized hardware from taking over. Witness the ASICs for scrypt, Equihash, CryptoNight, ethash, and Cuckatoo. Also, a good PoW should be trivially verifiable and thus hashcash makes a poor memory hard PoW [1]

[1] http://cryptorials.io/beyond-hashcash-proof-work-theres-mini...