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Cryptocurrency mining using integrated photonics

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Re: Cryptocurrency mining using integrated photonics

#4

Post by automatic6131 »

dvh wrote: post #3

Green light is 200nm, but we are already approaching 2nm with electronics, wouldn't that make any equivalent light CPU 100x larger/slower?

This has two false assumptions, one being that the process number (a marketing number chiefly), has any physical meaing. And another that you can compare it to the wave length of light. And also green light is 500-560nm.

Re: Cryptocurrency mining using integrated photonics

#5

Post by tromp »

oPoW FAQ from [1]

1. Is there reason to believe that the manufacturing of oPoW miners will be more decentralized than ASIC manufacturing currently?

There are no guarantees in decentralized networks, but we think all evidence points to oPoW creating a more decentralized network.

a. Cost of entering oPoW hardware manufacturing will be much lower due to Silicon Photonics using old CMOS nodes (~90 or 220 nm vs. ~7 nm for transistors).

b. Removing electricity prices from the mining equation means that miners do not have to concentrate in regions with cheap power or depend on the sanction of governments that control most energy sources.

2. What other costs would replace energy?

Hardware depreciation

3. Why create Heavy Hash, why not just compute SHA256 optically? This accomplishes the same goal without any changes to the Bitcoin codebase.

Many have tried… there is a large economic incentive. Analog optical computing is limited in the types of computations it can do efficiently. It’s much more feasible to design the PoW around those limitations.

9. When will optical mining hardware be available?

General-purpose photonic coprocessors are being commercialized by multiple companies that have shown interest in supporting mining hardware. Stay tuned for announcements.

10. Is the oPoW algorithm limited to optical devices? If not, will there be miners on the system using digital hardware?

oPoW is reverse compatible with CPUs, GPUs, and ASICs.

11. Is oPoW less secure than SHA256?

oPoW is based on Heavy Hash, a construction that includes SHA3 and inherits all of its security properties. (see Towards Optical Proof of Work above for a cryptographic analysis).

[1] https://www.powx.org/opow

[2] HeavyHash: https://github.com/PoWx-Org/obtc-miner/tree/master/algo/heav...

Re: Cryptocurrency mining using integrated photonics

#9

Post by jazzyjackson »

What's this about manufacturing photonic reservoir computers with old CMOS processes? We can do matrix multiplication with photon-buckets or what?

Edit: I guess I'll read the paper for its intro to photonics, I haven't really heard of doing useful math with this stuff https://assets.pubpub.org/xi9h9rps/01581688887859.pdf

Re: Cryptocurrency mining using integrated photonics

#10

Post by user-the-name »

tromp wrote: post #5

oPoW FAQ from [1] 1. Is there reason to believe that the manufacturing of oPoW miners will be more decentralized than ASIC manufacturing currently? There are no guarantees in decentralized networks, but we think all evidence points to oPoW creating a more decentralized network. a. Cost of entering oPoW hardware manufacturing will be much lower due to Silicon Photonics using old CMOS nodes (~90 or 220 nm vs. ~7 nm for…

> 2. What other costs would replace energy?

> Hardware depreciation

In other words, instead of massive environmental damage through energy production, we would have massive environmental damage through e-waste.

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