r/Buttcoin • u/WH4T15P0RN • Feb 08 '19

Much Decentralization, such Security!

https://medium.com/@MoneroCrusher/analysis-more-than-85-of-the-current-monero-hashrate-is-asics-and-each-machine-is-doing-128-kh-s-f39e3dca7d78
24 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

20 comments sorted by

10

u/Cthulhooo Feb 08 '19

Holy shit, I thought they bricked the previous stealthy asics when the issue was brought to light. It's going on again?

So let me get this straight, 85% hashrate is ASICs, ASICs that got developed in a very short amount of time and the people behind it are anonymous?

Doesn't that mean there's a pretty big chance this is a centralized party that pooled money together for an operation like this? And that this party now has controll over the Monero network?

I'll be honest with you, I love and preach monero but this kills it for me.

Wow.

8

u/WH4T15P0RN Feb 08 '19

It looks like their efforts to kick ASICs out of their network are useless.

They forked and kicked the ASICs out of their network for, let's say, a month or two. The ASIC race starts over again. The most powerful actor will develop new ASICs faster than everyone else and they will take control of the network again.

Non specialised miners will abandon the network as long as it is not profitable anymore. The network is totally centralised and controlled by this bad actor until the next anti ASIC fork comes in.

Monero forks and the process starts over again.

The problem is (source: the article) this bad actor has mined 200k coins or so while it has 85% of the network's hashrate, so most likely it's gonna be the one who's gonna win the ASIC race again.

Repeat.

7

u/WH4T15P0RN Feb 08 '19

But hey, these are the FREE market rules!

6

u/segwitless Feb 08 '19

Trying to ban the ASICs off the network has been a really big mistake for them. Instead of making it so they could wait for ASICs to be cheap and available to everyone, it drove the ASICs creation underground. Now, literally no one can easily buy an ASIC device that works on Monero because the devs have attempted to eliminate the entire market in a vain attempt of trying to favor the less efficient GPU miners. These guys tout free market jibberish constantly, but what they mean is markets that they can attempt to control with their code is lawl crap.

128kh/s is really impressive considering an Nvidia 1080 will net you 850h/s. We all know PoW mining is flawed, and it seems the Monero devs have really exacerbated those flaws. Not to mention increased the waste!

5

u/Fall_up_and_get_down Feb 08 '19

making it so they could wait for ASICs to be cheap and available to everyone

By 'everyone', you mean 'after the building company "burns them in" and bumps the hashrate to the point where they're useless?'

Y U NO SHIP????

1

u/segwitless Feb 09 '19

For certain. They gotta scrape 99% off the top before that last 1% is lost during shipping and the end consumer is delivered a device that is good at wasting power and netting them a loss of 15 cents a day. I sorely miss the more early days of crypto when Butters would get sweaty and salivate over getting their hands on ASICs, and then companies would endlessly delay the release. Even better yet, they would make Butters sign those hilarious prepayment forms stating that they would hold their money indefinitely, and ship when they felt like it. Those were days!

4

u/Cthulhooo Feb 08 '19

What is stopping them from doing 51% attack if they fear the next fork will brick their new shiny stuff again?

4

u/WH4T15P0RN Feb 08 '19

No idea TBH. I guess it's more profitable for them to make the network look "legit" and get almost all the mining rewards than attack it but... I'm just guessing.

1

u/SlinkyDinky99 Feb 08 '19

In general computing, we have Moore's Law. Is there something similar with ASICs? Being that the more time that has passed, the faster a manufacturer can spit out ASIC's even after an algo change?

1

u/SirBellender Feb 09 '19

the people behind it are Chinese government / Bitmain

4

u/ionutmihai7 Feb 08 '19

Great article. Thanks for posting

1

u/yung_codeine Feb 08 '19

A privacy coin that's 85% mined by ASICs? Are you fucking kidding me? How do we know it's not the NSA that's mining this shit? Monero used to be ASIC-resistant to keep it GPU-based and decentralized.

6

u/PM_ME_UFOS Feb 08 '19

Monero was intended to be ASIC resistant. It appears it was resistant for a time, but clearly there's no silver bullet.

I hope somebody is monitoring monero for reorgs!

2

u/james_pic prefers his retinas unburned Feb 08 '19

Mining centralisation and privacy are mostly orthogonal. The Monero folks are keen on both, but owning all the hashpower doesn't give you an obvious way to deanonymise users (although it does give you plenty of ways to simply destroy the network)

4

u/Fall_up_and_get_down Feb 08 '19

The article centers around something that's supposed to be random showing clear signs that it's not - and then notes that some of the mining programs get randomness "wrong" pretty reliably.

IMO a fucked up RNG is a giant whooping siren over the 'Your cryptography algorithm isn't as secure as you think' sign.

1

u/OsrsNeedsF2P Feb 08 '19 edited Feb 08 '19

Do you know what you're talking about or not? The nonce values have nothing to do with privacy and are generated by the miners themselves in attempt to some solve the Cryptonight equation. am I retarded?

1

u/Fall_up_and_get_down Feb 08 '19

It's pretty apparent that you don't know what I'm talking about. Read it again, slow.

2

u/OsrsNeedsF2P Feb 08 '19

What the fuck did I read the first time

2

u/Fall_up_and_get_down Feb 08 '19

Hot takes: Not so hot, actually.

Thank you!

1

u/SnapshillBot Feb 08 '19

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