Guys, let's rally together as DigiByte Knights and mine MYRIAD CLASSIC to send out a message that Immutability of blockchain is paramount. Get your Qubit ASIC today at baikalminer.com !!
Just joking. But anyway,
I accept that Bitcoin and litecoin are secured by large amounts of mainly centralised hashing but I don’t know if I would say they were truly secure because of it. They are prohibitively expensive for someone new to make an attack on and the ultimate fear is that a government or powerful organisation may choose to deliberately disrupt the blockchain but you know what, I don’t see them winning by being disruptive, they ultimately win by mining more coin and fees. I don’t know how truly decentralized etherium really is and I suspect we already have a rouge super computer or two in the mix. As far as I know, Doge is mainly merge mined with litecoin. I have said before, I don’t think this is a great strategy for mining as your support can be quickly removed, like it was for IXC. That’s a friendly warning from my perspective. Doge also has practically an unlimited supply; I just can’t take it seriously at all as an investment that is. It may hold its current value for eternity!
Just a couple of points I disagree on:
"I don’t see them winning by being disruptive, they ultimately win by mining more coin and fees."
Yes... People don't see the need to attack coins with weak security. Better to just not invest in them, and not bother to mine them...
"Doge is mainly merge mined with litecoin. I have said before, I don’t think this is a great strategy for mining as your support can be quickly removed, like it was for IXC. "
True, but at the same time, Bitcoin and Litecoin(+auxcoins) dominate the hash rate for their respective PoWs to such a degree that if you don't enable merged mining, your hash rate will likely be so low that a profit switching pool could easily jump on at any time and inflict the same damage. And in fact they will do that attack, not out of malice, but because it's profitable. Meanwhile with merged mining, yes, an attack would be 'free', but they would actually profit from mining it honestly (consistently), so why would they attack?
Besides, when you add multi-PoWs, the situation becomes different from ixcoin. If Scrypt gets attacked, the blocks keep coming from the other PoWs. The chain doesn't get stuck while we're waiting for the difficulty to come back down.
I kind of see where you are coming from, I’m not so concerned about pools jumping for profit as I see that as legitimate business on the network and is an advantage to be taken by someone friendly or otherwise. It adds to overall network capacity so it should not pose a threat. Many professional miners do not hold the coins they mine because they see that as outside their remit anyway. Hard core supporters of a digital currency mine it even when it does not look profitable, because they understand that much of the time someone is trying to make it look unprofitable to make a profit.(DigiByte Knights)
Bitcoin or Litecoin unfortunately are so centralized today, that they could be seriously disrupted if not destroyed by military hardware, terrorists or even an accidental fire or flood. I’m sure this was never an original intention.
Because merge mining is predominantly pooled it is way more centralized, alternatively anyone solo mining actually adds a full node to support and strengthen the network(DigiByte Knights).
When a large amount of the mining is being done by machines predominantly mining something else, they are inclined to treat it as a bonus. At the same time individual miners are less likely to be attracted to mining your coin because of the competition and DigiByte is attempting to build a strong truly decentralized model.
Nobody can tell you right now, what we will in reality achieve because that will depend on whom and how many get on the bus.