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Comment by nnq | Hacker News Reader

> the Red Queen effect ("running just to stand still")

It would be good if it were actually and deliberately properly designed this way to create an arms race of "who can get more general-purpose computing power for less" because it would accelerate technology development with this Red Queen effect...

Unfortunately they've missed the "general purpose part" - most mining todays is done by special-purpose hardware made for mining only, and improving it is generally useless for CPU / GPU / TPU design.

I'd fully support a similar coin that would be mine-able on GPU / TPU / other-general-matrix-multiplication-hardware because it would lead to a race decreasing the price of hardware that can run large neural networks :)

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Yeah, if it were designed in such a way as to incentivize general purpose computing, or to reward producing the results of some useful scientific or mathematical computation, then I would be less appalled by it.

As it stands, brute-forcing SHA256 on ASICs is just a travesty.

there are lots of coins with algorithms designed to resist ASICs. Bitcoin just isn't one of them.

There is a downside to designing a mining algorithm tuned for general purpose CPUs: anyone with access to a lot of general purpose CPUs (such as botnet operators, or government groups) can easily aim their existing resources to try to do 51% attacks against the cryptocurrency.

If the mining algorithm requires specialized hardware, then no group starts out with an existing advantage. If the NSA decided it wanted to 51% attack a cryptocurrency, they'd have to make a massive investment in their own hardware, and then that hardware can't be repurposed after the attack. A 51% attack is likely to devastate the value of a cryptocurrency, which also de-values any mining hardware built for it, which naturally discourages anyone who invested in mining hardware from attacking the cryptocurrency.

Though mining algorithms that require specialized hardware also come with their own downsides: the companies that invest in making the mining hardware early on could decide to keep the most advanced mining hardware for themselves and gain a lot of control over the network.

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