So, Coinbase dropped an article a few days ago on Friday about FACT0RN, which is one of the projects backed by their Crypto Community Fund Awards. It features a user called LionesEscanor on Twitter.
You can find the blockchain's website at fact0rn.io. They’ve got a whitepaper available there too. Has anyone had a chance to look into this? Is anyone actually mining this yet? What are your thoughts?
> gHash runs in about 5−10 milliseconds on x86; tested on both Intel and AMD processors.
Implementing this function on an ASIC would be a nightmare, and it is designed to be. The
resource consumption is vast in logic and memory
Making gHash super complex and hard to verify runs counter to the design principles for a good PoW.
If vast resource consumption is the goal, then this can be achieved without high complexity and slow verification.
E.g. replace gHash by Cuckoo Cycle [1], the simplest possible memory hard puzzle, or by Equihash.
[1] https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo
The whole point of gHash is to make it hard to implement in an ASIC, not to make it simpler. The complexity is exactly what is needed to make it hard to implement on ASICS, or FPGAs, for that matter. Plus, this is fast enough to verify quickly. The block target time is 30 minutes.
Your chain is called FACT0RN, not GHASH.
The whole point is to make a PoW dominated by factoring.
Any preparatory hashing should take a relatively negligible amount of time,
not so much that you have to start worrying whether it could be optimized by ASIC.
Perhaps you should read the whitepaper. That way you can avoid yelling, and perhaps, learn why gHash is designed the way it is. But, who knows? Maybe reading is not your forte. Incidentally, gHash does take a neglible amount of time while still protecting the blockchain from a mathematical attack using gHash that is described in the whitepaper. Again, reading the whitepaper will allow a conversation that is much more productive than the one we are currently having.
Project has moved forward a lot meantime.
There is a mining pool available https://thefactory.solutions/
Bounty System aka "KeyBoard" has been implemented and roughly 1400 bounties have been solved.
Project has rebranded itself to "factor". Homepage: https://projectfactor.io/