Hello, I had a thought after reading Mike Hearn's blog about it being impossible to have an ASIC-proof proof of work algorithm.
Perhaps I'm being dim, but I thought I'd mention my thought anyway. It strikes me that he's right that it's impossible for any algorithm to exist that can't be implemented in an ASIC. However, that's only because it's trying to pick an algorithm that is CPU bound. You could protect against ASCI mining (or rather, make it irrelevant that it was being used) by making the algorithm IO-bound rather than CPU-bound. For example, what if the proof-of-work hash for a block were no longer just "hash of block", which contains the hash of the parent block, but instead were hash of [NEW_BLOCK] [ALL_PREVIOUS_BLOCKS] [NEW_BLOCK] [ALL_PREVIOUS_BLOCKS] is now 20GB (from memory) and growing. By prefixing and suffixing the new block, you have to feed every byte of the blockchain through the hashing engine (the prefix prevents you caching the intermediate result). Whatever bus you're using to feed your high speed hashing engine, it will always be faster than the bus -- hence you're now IO-bound, not CPU-bound, and any hashing engine will, effectively, be the same. I'm making the assumption that SHA-256 is not cacheable from the middle outwards, so the whole block-chain _has_ to be transferred for every hash. Apologies in advance if this is a stupid idea. Andy -- Dr Andy Parkins andypark...@gmail.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Open source business process management suite built on Java and Eclipse Turn processes into business applications with Bonita BPM Community Edition Quickly connect people, data, and systems into organized workflows Winner of BOSSIE, CODIE, OW2 and Gartner awards http://p.sf.net/sfu/Bonitasoft _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
