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by joosters
3232 days ago
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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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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