Great idea.
Will this hamper the GPU miners...
Not really.
It depends on our success.
The main reason I'm doing these algo updates is to extend the cheap and fair mining period as far as possible into the future.
Everyone can decently mine ZETTEL right now, no need for initial hardware investments, no high electricity bill. And this should prevail even if we reach 1 GH/s net hash rate.
(even then you'll be able to find 1 block a week using an average CPU)
But should a time come where ZETTEL is on one or more exchanges with a decent price and corresponding hash rate, it may very well be that by then we'll have attracted our own resident GPU devs who will probably be able to invest a lot of their time coding new miners.
But even then, the question arises: will they drop their GPU miners for everyone to use, or use them themselves? Or will they sell it?
Will the GPU-community be ready to pay large amounts of money to hire a GPU dev? Over and over again?
Hmmmmm....
Most GPU devs I know are living like nomads, they are moving where profit can be made, often releasing one single GPU miner that is then used forever by the community, with no further updates since no other GPU will ever want to invest time again. They maybe do optimizations and performance improvements... but a complete rewrite of the hash algo? I think they will hate that because it might break their optimizations too....
Crypto moves fast, maybe if we keep up with its step we can outrun the GPU-horde, or - as is my stated goal - extend the fair and cheap CPU-mining phase as far as possible into the future, since this is very essential to the further success of the coin.
I guess we will have to on our toes not to miss the algo chain.
As a CPU-miner all you have to do is just update the wallet early enough. And the wallet itself will inform you about upcoming changes.
So there can't really be any mistakes.
But yes, if you - for whatever reason - fail to update the wallet, you'll be mining on the wrong chain.