Nothing is hard if you hire the right people, indeed. It is just not necessarily economical and, well, hard to get things done as your Labcoin example shows.
indeed and people (especially engineers and chip designers) is something china has in abundance.
Labcoin failed because it was run by failed business people who hired a student to do their work for them.
that speaks more of the incompetence of management than it does the complexity of the task.
but you are right.... Maxcoin has to be actually worth something before people will bother making ASICs for it.
DRK on the other hand IS worth something... and so you can safely assume that X11 ASIC designs will become part of the landscape before too long...
So it wont take much for someone to hack the X11 miner software to just hash Keccak.
took me about 2 days when I tried it... but by the time I had finished someone else had already released a working miner that did it better...
Keccak is not ASIC resistant and never was... it just never made sense for anyone with deep pockets to bother.
if you could then we'd all have nuclear fusion by now... and that would be awesome..
