DigiByte is currently 60% ASIC dominated and 40% normal hardware friendly. Although I understand people’s resentment of hardware technology development and the centralizing effect, these are real industries with real growth potential already stimulating this and the fiat economy outside. They help to make DGB more secure because of their efficiency and costs involved necessary to compete with them. The DGB mined by people armed with ASIC miners have real costs associated with their rewards. If all the BTC mining suddenly switched to DGB, they could only bag 20% of the DGB available, same if all the LTC miners switched to mining DGB again another 20%. The fact that we can fend off total ASIC offensive is already a major advantage. At any time in the future we could switch to an algo that you could only mine with a verified DGB ID, purely for distribution purposes at that time perhaps. That’s just an idea, nothing in concrete I know about. Anyway, as long as DGB maintains a comparable ratio of ASIC and non ASIC mining I don’t see any real need for concern now. Possibly removing an algo like Qubit now might even be damaging and weaken overall security of DigiByte?
Aside from Qubit, Myriad-Groestl and Skein are covered by Baikal X10. So, all algos are ASIC dominated right now.
WoW! This is an ASIC practically being sold as a DigiByte miner! That is pretty important and a major driving force for DigiByte progression, I’d guess. I agree it threatens decentralization though so at least one algo will need swapping out very soon!
what do you think sha or scrypt?
I think DGB doesn't need 5 algos. In my opinion, 3 algos, SHA256, cryptonight and equihash would be perfect for DGB if the goal is equal distribution of mining opportunity. That is:
1) SHA256 - ASIC focused
2) Cryptonight - CPU and AMD GPUs
3) Equihash - Nvidia GPUs
Distribution is obviously important but security is still a heavy consideration too and undoubtedly ASICs have their part to play in this. I think many of our ASIC miners are currently still individuals or small enterprise and contribute positively to the DigiByte ecosystem.
Personally, I’m thinking it would be better, when choosing the replacement algos to be mined on normal hardware, that clear instruction on how to get up and mining on it was given to the community at this time, hopefully reducing the time for organised miners to make a real killing here. I’m also thinking, It’s fairly likely that at least one algo will need swapping out regularly as the efficiency drive, possibly moves these into ASIC development too.
Eventually we may have to accept total ASIC dominance of the market because after all, this is technology and technology advances so what then becomes important is, how available and affordable is the technology to everyone? Always have it in the back of my mind that one day, one of these algos will be used like a universal payment system.
But I don’t think DigiByte should reduce to only three algorithms and I don’t really believe the three you have suggested would really offer better distribution either at this time and I’m pretty certain security wouldn’t improve.
Anyway, looking forward to seeing what does happen here.