Luke Dashjr [ARCHIVE] on Nostr: 📅 Original date posted:2014-07-04 📝 Original message:On Friday, July 04, 2014 ...
📅 Original date posted:2014-07-04
📝 Original message:On Friday, July 04, 2014 8:21:42 PM Jorge Timón wrote:
> On 7/4/14, kjj <bitcoin-devel at jerviss.org> wrote:
> > I suspect that there exist no algorithms which cannot be done better in
> > an application-specific device than in a general purpose computer. And
> > if there is such a thing, then it must necessarily perform best on one
> > specific platform, making that platform the de facto application
> > specific device.
> >
> > I'm not sure how one would go about proving or disproving that, but it
> > seems very likely to be true.
>
> I assumed this was obvious and self-evident for anyone who knows what
> a Turing machine is, but judging from the number of smart people
> wasting their time on the pursue of the "anti-ASIC" myth (also known
> as pow wankery) it seems I was wrong.
> Anything you can do with software you can do with hardware and
> viceversa (you can even do it with ropes and fire in Minecraft!!)
> Does this really need any proof?
> I think it's the hard-pow cultists who have to provide a counterexample.
Really, if people want to pursue a goal anything like this, they should be
looking for "ASIC already widely owned" as the property rather than "anti-
ASIC". Thus, a sufficiently memory-hard PoW would really be "RAM is the ASIC".
Whether it's possible to make this or not, is another question. And then we
get back to "is is really a desirable property to have people capable of
mining who have not given any indication of interest?"
📝 Original message:On Friday, July 04, 2014 8:21:42 PM Jorge Timón wrote:
> On 7/4/14, kjj <bitcoin-devel at jerviss.org> wrote:
> > I suspect that there exist no algorithms which cannot be done better in
> > an application-specific device than in a general purpose computer. And
> > if there is such a thing, then it must necessarily perform best on one
> > specific platform, making that platform the de facto application
> > specific device.
> >
> > I'm not sure how one would go about proving or disproving that, but it
> > seems very likely to be true.
>
> I assumed this was obvious and self-evident for anyone who knows what
> a Turing machine is, but judging from the number of smart people
> wasting their time on the pursue of the "anti-ASIC" myth (also known
> as pow wankery) it seems I was wrong.
> Anything you can do with software you can do with hardware and
> viceversa (you can even do it with ropes and fire in Minecraft!!)
> Does this really need any proof?
> I think it's the hard-pow cultists who have to provide a counterexample.
Really, if people want to pursue a goal anything like this, they should be
looking for "ASIC already widely owned" as the property rather than "anti-
ASIC". Thus, a sufficiently memory-hard PoW would really be "RAM is the ASIC".
Whether it's possible to make this or not, is another question. And then we
get back to "is is really a desirable property to have people capable of
mining who have not given any indication of interest?"