Nice! Long time Karma supporter here (just not vocally on the forums, but a little over on reddit). I like the move to X11 from an energy efficiency viewpoint but it feels more like an anti-ASIC move. ASIC's are far more energy efficient than GPU's or CPU's so a combo of the 2 will be best for a sustainable cryptocurrency future. *disclaimer: I own no ASIC hardware, just offering my opinion.
I also think the 2 year estimation for ASIC introduction to X11 is pretty far off. Considering DarkCoin is trading in the $10-$13 USD range and the popularity of other X11 coins I would expect it to happen sooner. Early next year if not the end of this year. Again, just my non-expert prediction.
Either way, good news for now and looking forward to more mining.
even though you consider yourself a non-expert your comments are pretty much spot on.
Any kind of PoW that uses an algo not in the X11 or scrypt groups (e.g. X13) may make it economically unviable to produce an ASIC for the next 2 years but we may yet see X11 ASICs this year.
though I am not opposed to X11 per se.. I am wondering how such an important decision was made without a community vote.
I am also not sure that the bigger issue of too frequent block reward halving is going to be fixed by a switch to X11.
in the interests of stability I would push for a more granular and and much more gradual reduction in block rewards.
if I was going to design a new coin today I would pick something like block reward goes down 1% every month or 10% every year. I have not done the math but something that has a much more gradual decline in reward yet keeps to the original coin count projections over the next 5-10 years would give the market more stability. I don't know if that holy grail is even possible this late in the game but it is definitely worth a little research.
Ideally in the long term I (as a coin investor) would want to see the supply of new coins to increase by less than the official inflation rate of the USD this would guarantee that there is always some very slight upward pressure on the price even if nothing is happening in the crypto community.
this would be ideal regardless of if a coin was PoW or PoS or whatever.
how to live with such low coin creation rate yet still keep the miners/speculators interested.. that is the real crux of the matter.
I will agree that GPU (X11 etc) mining is a much fairer way to get a broader distribution of coins to new people.
asking people to buy the coins outright (PoS) or buy specialised hardware (ASICs) is always going to be a barrier to entry for people who are new to the idea of crypto currency.
imagine having a new religion (or social organisation) where you had to pay to join or you had to buy a new outfit just to be recognised as a member... the kinds of organisations that are free for anyone to participate are the ones that grow fastest.
) 
im not the only one mining there right? 
