I would propose to replace Cryptonight with the new cryptonight that monero will use in October. That would give us a lot more honest hashing power in my view.
This has been the plan in regards to
Cryptonight, although it imposes a develoment burden that must be met, every 6 months. For this reason, in my mind, it is reasonable to keep Cryptonight exempt from any proposed mmRRf, so that the mining community is motivated to keep the merge-mineability of Bitmark with Monero viable. This commitment to change from the Monero devs means that they are committed to de-centralized mining.
It is mainly the ASIC algos (
sha, scrypt & equihash) that have known and varied ASIC implementations, where I think a merge-reduction factor is justified; My feeling on the CPU / GPU friendly algos is that any mmRRf reduction on merge-mining must be substantially less than would be for the ASIC algos, in particular
Lyra2REv2, where
@metalicjames and the VertCoin community are also committed to remain democratic and de-centralized. As a composite algo, like Lyra2REv2,
X17 is also CPU/GPU friendly by nature.
Yescrypt/Yespower is CPU friendly and ASIC agnostic/neutral, as per @solardesigner. My inclination on Yescrypt is to take heed of @solardesigner's advice, and tune it for cryptocurrency use (our use) by evolving it into Yespower. Further, I suggest we, as The Bitmark Foundation, join the Yespower Consortium to have a voice on its future development, although this will require that we pool funds to gather 1 BTC.
Because, it is one of two existing algos, along with
Argon2d, that are not implemented (at least not yet) on ASIC's and that do not have large parent chains, I propose them as the least-disruptive route back to having some native-only algos. I believe that reserving some (a minority, in this case 25% of our algos) for native mining is entirely reasonable and appropriate. The security of the chain is well-assured in any case, and fostering native mining and yes, giving core supporters a bit of a "
home team advantage" if you will, is desirable, logical, has been done by practically every other mPoW coin, and is called for by a segment of our mining community.
The expected value of the honest hashing power is h*P, where h is the hashrate and P is the probability that a miner is honest. For native mining, it is not hard to imagine P being greater on average, though h is very small and there can be quick burst attacks where dishonest miners suddenly flood in, so variance is high on honest hashpower and expected value is low when you are a small coin.
Indeed, because in the equation h * P, we can fairly reasonably assume that P is higher for native algos, we should at least have some. If the native algos are ones where CPU mining is dominant (maybe GPU to a lesser extent), it is less likely that there will be attack attempts. Further, because there are 8 algos, and many are merge-mined, truly, the probability of a succesful attack overall is vanishingly small. So, in the balance of things, I think it is wise to have somewhere between 1/3 to 1/4 of native algos in the mix.