<story><title>Monero Declares War on ASIC Manufacturers</title><url>https://www.ccn.com/monero-declares-war-asic-manufacturers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mrb</author><text>As a Bitcoin miner since 2010, the hostility toward ASIC-based mining rig manufacturers has rarely made sense to me. ASICs &lt;i&gt;strengthen&lt;/i&gt; your network. The requirement to have specialized hardware to mine profitably, hence pushing miners to the highest joule&amp;#x2F;hash metric physically reachable will make a PoW-based cryptocurrency much more secure with respect to majority attacks (so-called 51% attacks.) Cryptocurrency devs should welcome and embrace ASIC miners.&lt;p&gt;By far, the majority of GPU farms mine Ethereum. This mean any GPU-mineable coin other than Ethereum is trivially vulnerable to majority attacks. The only thing preventing these attacks from happening is the financial incentives &lt;i&gt;against&lt;/i&gt; performing such a purely destructive attack.&lt;p&gt;ASIC-mineable coins are safe from such attacks from GPU miners.&lt;p&gt;People point out that the high barrier of entry into ASIC manufacturing can lead to monopolies, such as Bitmain which is a quasi- (not quite) monopoly with its 70-80% market share in Bitcoin with the S9. But first and foremost, manufacturing monopolies don&amp;#x27;t matter to the &lt;i&gt;function&lt;/i&gt; of Bitcoin. A manufacturing monopoly isn&amp;#x27;t a hashrate monopoly: Bitmain cannot attack Bitcoin. They themselves only directly own &amp;lt;10% of the hashrate.¹&lt;p&gt;¹ Not to be confused with Bitmain&amp;#x27;s mining pools which represent more than a third of the hashrate. People usually misunderstand the function and nature of mining pools. End-users choose to mine at whatever pool they want. If Bitmain&amp;#x27;s pools started sending malicious mining jobs to stratum clients, the community would react and the end-users would promptly abandon them. So in practice Bitmain cannot do whatever they want for however long they want with their pools&amp;#x27; hashrate. They enjoy the privilege of representing this hashrate, and this privilege could evaporate overnight.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pradn</author><text>Increasing collective hash-power doesn&amp;#x27;t necessarily increase the decentralization guarantees of cryptocurrencies. It&amp;#x27;s more important that hashpower is distributed among many people.</text></comment>
<story><title>Monero Declares War on ASIC Manufacturers</title><url>https://www.ccn.com/monero-declares-war-asic-manufacturers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mrb</author><text>As a Bitcoin miner since 2010, the hostility toward ASIC-based mining rig manufacturers has rarely made sense to me. ASICs &lt;i&gt;strengthen&lt;/i&gt; your network. The requirement to have specialized hardware to mine profitably, hence pushing miners to the highest joule&amp;#x2F;hash metric physically reachable will make a PoW-based cryptocurrency much more secure with respect to majority attacks (so-called 51% attacks.) Cryptocurrency devs should welcome and embrace ASIC miners.&lt;p&gt;By far, the majority of GPU farms mine Ethereum. This mean any GPU-mineable coin other than Ethereum is trivially vulnerable to majority attacks. The only thing preventing these attacks from happening is the financial incentives &lt;i&gt;against&lt;/i&gt; performing such a purely destructive attack.&lt;p&gt;ASIC-mineable coins are safe from such attacks from GPU miners.&lt;p&gt;People point out that the high barrier of entry into ASIC manufacturing can lead to monopolies, such as Bitmain which is a quasi- (not quite) monopoly with its 70-80% market share in Bitcoin with the S9. But first and foremost, manufacturing monopolies don&amp;#x27;t matter to the &lt;i&gt;function&lt;/i&gt; of Bitcoin. A manufacturing monopoly isn&amp;#x27;t a hashrate monopoly: Bitmain cannot attack Bitcoin. They themselves only directly own &amp;lt;10% of the hashrate.¹&lt;p&gt;¹ Not to be confused with Bitmain&amp;#x27;s mining pools which represent more than a third of the hashrate. People usually misunderstand the function and nature of mining pools. End-users choose to mine at whatever pool they want. If Bitmain&amp;#x27;s pools started sending malicious mining jobs to stratum clients, the community would react and the end-users would promptly abandon them. So in practice Bitmain cannot do whatever they want for however long they want with their pools&amp;#x27; hashrate. They enjoy the privilege of representing this hashrate, and this privilege could evaporate overnight.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>madamelic</author><text>In Monero, the idea is that hash power should be spread throughout rather than consolidated and fought over by high-power people.&lt;p&gt;I see your point about ASICs raising the bar but wouldn&amp;#x27;t that put contributions out of reach of all but high-wealth or dedicated miners? Which is basically what has happened to Bitcoin. It is completely uneconomical for anyone but people with free to very cheap electricity and lots of ASICs.&lt;p&gt;I believe the point of Monero is that power shouldn&amp;#x27;t be consolidated to a single few.</text></comment>