Re: Can someone help me estimate the costs of doing this?

On Sun, Dec 28, 2014 at 6:08 AM, <danielw@emaildoge.com> wrote:

Do you know what kind of hardware would be needed to make this a thousand
times, or ten thousand times, more efficient? (So that it would take
0.12/1000 or 0.12/10000 seconds.)

Remember, the vast majority of the price of _your_ computer goes into paying for things other than the hardware needed for scrypt. I'm guessing even on your hardware you could make it 4x speed, just by running 4 threads at once (on a quad core).

the good news is, scrypt needs ram, and a retail consumer (you) only pays about double the cheapest possible price for ram. It's likely that even top level attackers would just get off-the-shelf ram for the job.

> How expensive hardware are we talking about? Millions of dollars, or less?

> Just looking for rough estimates.

half what you paid for ram (currently around $25/GB on pccasegear), assume CPU's, motherboards, etc are free, then see how many instances/threads of scrypt you could run at once which fit in that much ram, and that's your cost.

there are time-memory tradeoffs, so assume for an extra $1000 someone can get 4x as many scrypts in the same amount of ram (running an ASIC for the computation, and only storing some of the blocks they should be, then regenerating the missing ones as needed).