
Litecoin [LTC] X11 hardfork at block 564,480 - sidko
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=549572.0;all
======
arbus
> We don't need the Litecoin developers. > We need the majority to support
> this to make this hardfork work.

This is a pretty interesting comment from the person who is proposing the
fork. I wonder how the currency will split if a sizable amount of people
switch to this method of mining? Will the devs be forced to accept their fork
or will this just split off into a litecoin 2.0 that is ASIC resistant which
previously mined coins grandfathered into this new fork

~~~
sliverstorm
Either outcome could happen. The devs can stick with the old fork, they can
move to the new one. To my knowledge there's no reason 2 litecoin networks
can't exist at the same time, aside from being inconvenient & confusing.

~~~
arbus
Could this lead to double spend scenerios? For example, I have 10 LTC on the
current system and these guys fork to form a new network. Can I then spend the
10 LTC I have twice, once on their new network and once on the old network?

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sktrdie
Isn't it just a matter of time that someone will make ASICs also for X11? To
me any type of algorithm can eventually be implemented in an ASIC. Perhaps
some algorithms take longer than others, but it's just a matter of time.

~~~
wes-exp
ASIC inevitability is a falsehood. Software can be modified very quickly,
whereas hardware requires much longer development cycles. Software can always
outpace hardware, if the community is willing to commit to ASIC resistance by
changing the software.

~~~
raverbashing
That's why FPGAs exist

And I'm sure existing ASICS can be adapted to new algorithms, they're
developed in VHDL/Verilog, surely, not as easily as changing an FPGA, still,
it won't be a work from scratch.

~~~
oakwhiz
The only way to exclude FPGAs from mining a cryptocurrency is to create a
problem that requires the average FPGA to completely (not partially) self-
reconfigure faster than the average FPGA's configuration time in order to be
competitive. Either that or somehow create a problem that requires more LUTs
and logic cells than an FPGA is capable of supplying. But then you could just
make multiple FPGAs work together. So you'd need some kind of latency based
problem to make it difficult for multiple FPGAs to work together.

Has anybody tried looking at making GPUs do what they are designed for? Namely
sorting and rasterizing triangles. If a cryptocurrency was made to use a very
large number of triangles as the problem, perhaps GPUs would be the most
efficient device to solve it with.

~~~
sliverstorm
FPGA's rule themselves out. You can use them for prototyping your ASIC, but
FPGA's are extremely costly per silicon area, and generally less power
efficient than anything else.

Oh, and nobody is using triangles because hashing lends itself so well to
Proof-of-Work. The "work" must be difficult to perform, but very easy to
verify. Like a zip file that takes 20 minutes to compress, but only 5 seconds
to unzip. To verify a triangle you would have to re-render it.

------
lucb1e
Yesterday something about Auroracoin (never heard of it before), now Litecoin
is undergoing some big change, and meanwhile the value of my bitcoins went
down 10% overnight. Can anyone explain to me what is happening? Why does
anyone care about Auroracoin and a Litecoin protocol change and why does it
drive another cryptocurrency's value down?

~~~
smtddr
* Apparently the Auroracoin thing was actually a planned fork.

* This Litecoin thing appears to be some random person with no authority trying to make stuff happen.

* Bitcoin price is falling because news is claiming banks in China must close all accounts related to bitcoin-businesses by April 15th. I don't know if it's true or not, but I'm not panic-selling my coins.

~~~
lucb1e
Thanks!

------
enko
I don't see what the point of this is? ASICs are actually good; they perform
the necessary proof of work while using a lot less power. Running all those
GPUs is a needless waste.

It sounds like this is just some GPU owners wanting to turn back time to
protect their assets.

~~~
Aqueous
the energy usage of bitcoin and the altcoins is, in my opinion, one of the few
things that could threaten its viability long term. people aren't going to be
able to understand the reasoning that this is the cost of decentralization -
it's going to look like a phenomenal waste of energy, even if low-powered
ASICs are doing most of the work. not that the average consumer has a problem
with that, but govts might.

i wonder if there is a solution to the byzantine general's problem with that
is resistant to 50% malicious nodes but doesn't require so much energy
overhead. even proof-of-stake coins still require energy wasting.

~~~
eloisius
> people aren't going to be able to understand the reasoning that this is the
> cost of decentralization

As compared to entire blocks of office high-rises in every major city required
for our current financial system?

~~~
Aqueous
Well, commercial organizations that own office space are already forming and
expanding around BitCoin - so the cost of keeping those businesses physically
open would be _in addition to_ the cost of keeping the BitCoin network up and
running. It's not like we're getting rid of the need for buildings.

------
gedrap
What I don't get is what's with those hundreds of alt coins. Sometimes I get a
feeling that people who missed the BTC growth are just trying to make up for
it by creating their own coin. I understand that people are passionate about
it and all, but it makes much more sense to have a few coins with plenty of
people working on it rather than a new coin popping up every week, and being
forgotten a few weeks later.

It's like everyone would fork Linux kernel, make some adjustment and try to
promote it as something new rather than doing a pull request.

Or, like everyone was writing their own blogging engines after WP's success.

~~~
facepalm
There is a lot of nonsense, but there are also some fascinating ideas being
tested out. For example I hope that "Proof of Stakes" instead of "Proof of
Work" can succeed, because I dislike the waste of energy that comes with
Bitcoin mining. Then there are differing distribution models, or the "encode a
contract" approaches. Anonymity is another interesting field.

------
pera
What is X11?

~~~
Bootvis
It is a combination of hashing algo's[1]: "X11 consists of the following
algorithms: blake, bmw, groestl, jh, keccak, skein, luffa, cubehash, shavite,
simd, and echo."

[1]:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/21bely/have_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/21bely/have_you_already_heard_of_x11_hashing_algorithm/)

~~~
pera
Yeah that's the only thing I found about it, but who created this, where is
the specifications, tests, etc.

This looks like someone took many different hash functions and for some reason
thinks it's "anti-ASIC"...

------
dragontamer
I wonder how long it will take before people start using Proof-of-Stake coins,
which don't have the ASIC mining issues at all. (Naturally, because "mining"
with Proof-of-Stake is not a competition of processing power)

~~~
gojomo
There are still problems with proof-of-stake being more manipulable and fork-
prone: the incentives to converge on a single consensus are much lower.
(Search for ["proof of stake" "nothing at stake"] for some related
discussion.)

------
sprash
Why not use Primecoin or Riecoin algorithms? Those won't work on GPUs/ASICS
either and produce some actual scientific value.

~~~
tromp
Only two downsides:

1) The existing algorithms for finding prime chains or clusters are rather
involved, and people may keep superior algorithms private.

2) They're not very botnet-resistant.

~~~
sliverstorm
Point #1 is actually kind of exciting to me.

~~~
tromp
Yes, as an algorithm designer myself, I can see the attraction:-) I'd make a
bad competitive miner though, as I'd be too eager to publish my optimizations,
and get some recognition for that...

------
mm0
[http://lmgtfy.com/?q=altcoin+pumps](http://lmgtfy.com/?q=altcoin+pumps)

------
facepalm
I guess that means the (tiny) amount of LTC I own has just doubled.

------
purplezky
so this hardforks into a new currency and you can still sell LTC on an
exchange which still supports it. Sounds like built in double spent.

~~~
FatalLogic
>a new currency

That's the answer to your question. It really is a new currency, but everyone
with Litecoins gets an amount of the new currency equal to their Litecoin
stake.

After that, Litecoin and Litecoin X11 are separate entities, which will not
have the same price. Possibly Litecoin X11 will be worthless, if it doesn't
get much support. Like any digital currency of this kind, it will be worth
whatever people are willing to pay for it. Exchanges will have to opt in to
accept Litecoin X11, as a separate currency from Litecoin.

~~~
sliverstorm
Or, if the buy-in is significant, Litecoin goes the way of the DoDo and
Litecoin X11 replaces it under the Litecoin moniker.

~~~
FatalLogic
That's possible, although it's less likely because if the X11 fork won, then
there's a chance the project would lose the original Litecoin developers.

That would be very disruptive, and would probably pull the price down, and
that is a risk which may deter some people from using the X11 fork.

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antocv
How can that site break so much on mobile devices/small screens, wth
completely unreadable. How do they do that escape from view effect?

------
raverbashing
I don't know what's the X11 protocol, but to think a protocol can be "ASIC
resistant" looks naive

Scrypt has a bigger memory footprint, but ASICs can work with more memory, no
problem

Not to mention decreasing mineability may end up isolating their fork (causing
their value to go down)

~~~
thirsteh
The point of scrypt isn't really to be "ASIC-resistant", but to make it much
more expensive to build ASICs to efficiently reverse its outputs.

~~~
raverbashing
I haven't heard any explanation why this would be so

Ok, this explains a little bit about X11
[http://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/21bely/have_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/21bely/have_you_already_heard_of_x11_hashing_algorithm/)

But whatever a GPU can do, a properly designed ASIC _can do as well_

It seems they're counting on implementation time for new ASICs for this
algorithm.

~~~
thirsteh
Indeed. They seem to be switching out and tunable unpredictable memory access
(i.e. have to spend a lot of money building an ASIC with a lot of die area --
see the scrypt paper to understand why:
[https://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt/scrypt.pdf](https://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt/scrypt.pdf))
for a faster but more "obfuscated" construction. The circuit needed to
implement this will be more complex, but it will be much cheaper to mass-
produce.

In short, this is what happens when people who know nothing about cryptography
try to sell their unexamined constructions.

