How Does the Availability of Specialized Mining Hardware (ASICs) Affect the ‘Cost to Attack’ for a PoW Coin?
ASIC-mined coins generally have a higher 'cost to attack' than GPU-mined coins because the specialized hardware is less readily available for rent. However, if a coin uses a common ASIC algorithm, the cost to attack can still be low because a large amount of existing hardware can be easily redirected.
The limited supply and high capital cost of ASICs create a barrier to entry, but also a point of centralization.
Glossar
Specialized Hardware
Architecture ⎊ Specialized hardware within cryptocurrency, options trading, and financial derivatives increasingly denotes custom-designed integrated circuits, often ASICs, optimized for specific cryptographic functions or computational tasks.
Availability
Latency ⎊ Availability, within cryptocurrency and derivatives, fundamentally concerns the speed at which a system can respond to requests, impacting order execution and arbitrage opportunities.
ASICs
Architecture ⎊ Application-Specific Integrated Circuits represent a fundamental shift in computational hardware within the cryptocurrency ecosystem, diverging from the general-purpose nature of CPUs and GPUs to offer substantial gains in hash rate efficiency for specific cryptographic algorithms.
Security Rationale
Justification ⎊ The security rationale, within the context of cryptocurrency derivatives, options trading, and financial derivatives, represents a documented articulation of the risk mitigation strategies and controls implemented to safeguard assets, maintain operational integrity, and ensure regulatory compliance.
Specialized Mining Hardware
Mining ⎊ Specialized Mining Hardware, overwhelmingly dominated by ASICs, refers to integrated circuits custom-designed to execute a single, specific hashing algorithm with maximum computational efficiency.
PoW Coin
Genesis ⎊ The Proof-of-Work (PoW) coin, fundamentally, represents a cryptographic consensus mechanism where transaction validation and block creation are secured through computational effort.