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).
> Cost of entering oPoW hardware manufacturing will be much lower
That just means more mining hardware will be manufactured and used. They might use less energy to run each one, but that likely to be balanced out by the energy costs of manufacture and the e-waste. More mining hardware will mean the difficulty will be increased by the system.
If a Bitcoin is worth $40,000, a miner somewhere will be prepared to spend approaching $40,000 to mine it. That money will be spent on a combination of buying the hardware and energy for running the hardware.
Any reduction in energy use or hardware costs will just mean the $40,000 will stretch further, meaning more e-waste and/or more energy use, and an adjustment in difficulty by the network.
> 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).
If silicon photonics using old process nodes is so competitive, cheap to manufacture and power-efficient, why aren't they planning to use it for general purpose workloads? Matrix-vector multiplication is a key operation for most GPU compute, including for machine learning. They say "...On the other hand, to be competitive in the field of machine learning, one needs to compute billions of multiply-accumulate operations per second" but that kind of scale out applies just as much to crypto mining, and is the part that's supposedly addressed by reusing old process nodes.
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...