scrypt and ASICs

grarpamp grarpamp at gmail.com
Thu May 15 15:28:52 PDT 2014


On Thu, May 15, 2014 at 5:59 PM, coderman <coderman at gmail.com> wrote:
> the other thread mentioned the "ASIC-able" ness of scrypt.
>
> what techniques may be used to make scrypt even harder to put on die?
>
> (is this an arms race between transistor count and algorithm tuneables?)

I've not read much on scrypt. Is there a relation to what
you see with AMD providing hUMA arch in their APUs
(Kaveri) where you have CPU and GPU cores being able
to read/write the same address space, lodge instruction
queues to each other, and even an ARM core onboard.
IOW, a merging of formerly hard discrete compute elements
now on one die and communicating freely, in open commerce,
would seem to make it harder to design resistant algos
like scrypt.

Maybe a next step in hard would be requiring extra nodes,
a globally minimum latency, checkpointed. We say memory
hard, storage hard, bit hard, time hard. What other hards
can we exploit without being fooled. Pheromones?



More information about the cypherpunks mailing list