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sgminer-dev / sgminer

Scrypt GPU miner
GNU General Public License v3.0
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X11 coin support #170

Closed sho-87 closed 10 years ago

sho-87 commented 10 years ago

is it possible to allow the mining of X11 coins (e.g. hirocoin)? Im currently using sph-sgminer for this but it would be nice to have everything within a single build so I dont have to keep switching

OhGodAPet commented 10 years ago

I think veox said this is scrypt-only, but I'll let him reply.

veox commented 10 years ago

I haven't looked into X11. Adding new algorithms is pretty low on my (personal) priority list. There's far too many other bugs/features to work on.

veox commented 10 years ago

As I understand from the Darkcoin whitepaper, "X11" (name collision, poor choice) does not use Scrypt (and does not provide memory-hardness).

As best described in the Ethereum whitepaper, memory-hardness is a necessity for proof-of-work cryptocurrencies. Any hashing function alone can be parallelised and implemented in an ASIC if there is enough economic incentive. It has already been done for SHA256, it can also be done for any of the 11 functions in "X11". Although it may take a while, sure.

I (personally) find this to be the wrong approach to making an algorithm ASIC-hard, and usable with general purpose hardware. Imroving on the flexibility of Scrypt (EDIT: in sgminer), such as making its parameters and hashing functions configurble, makes more sense.

There is also other software that implements these algorithms, like sph-sgminer and its forks/derivatives.

P.S. It would be best to discuss philosophy on the mailing list, since it does not get hidden once the issue is closed.