It appears crypto coins are adopting the razor blade strategy. I predict we will have a x22 algo in a month.
You guys can still mine Marucoins --- I did with my AMD 290x in the past. But now their difficulty is still very low, so it is still minable if you have AMD cards. Otherwise, wait for cc 1.1, maybe, :-). I checked the site that dev team is trying to redo the logo, etc. So seems it is still in active development now. The main argument here is that, when everyone goes for X11, and rumors about FPGA farms and x11 multipool hanging around the corner, the additional 2 algorithms will temporarily make them safer for GPU miners -- at least for short period of time.
When possible, mine coins that first implement some algorithm, they have higher chance of success in the future. That's the reason I mined some Maru, and not sell it yet. Same reason I still hold my HVC even the price crashed... (well, to confess, I also mined two days of MNR). Maybe DOGE is an exception here. I still love that community, and believe it may have some chance to take off... maybe even brighter future than LTC.
Given that, I personally would suggest mine some alternative coins with even temp 'additional' protection. Be it x13, x14, x15.... x100...
I haven't tried much Maru, I was late to the ninja cpu only launched and I barely tested the cgminer version.
Also X11 plus two other algos already coded for gpu, sound like dev had always his own gpu code... (took 2 or 3 days to phm to come up with his algo... ).
So I didn't really looked into it...
That's why I think later coins based on this algo have more chance to have some "success" as there won't be any suspicion and everybody will the code on launch. But clearly I don't think X13 or Xmore will have any real success (there isn't any innovation, just recycling...)
The development code for X11 looks good, I hope we won't have to wait christmas for the 880...
I was late to the coin as well. I did not bother CPU mining, and only after sgminer start supporting it, I think it was time to redirect my 290x to them -- at that time Hirocoin difficulty was high already (I missed Darkcoin and decide to give X11 a try, and Hirocoin seems ok among others). So far I think it is still minable. As I said, I personally don't think it is technically hard for FPGA or x11 multipools to attack them -- but there are other x11 easy targets, so before they are bored at x11, and before x13 (or x14...x100, whatever) become new targets of those sharks, I think it can still give us some quiet mining time.... for now. As it was said, you don't have to run faster than the bears, just run faster than your friends...., x11 is the meat now, and I decide to go x13 for now since the difficulty is still acceptable --- with pools at least, I did two days solo mine and then feel uncomfortable when it took longer and longer to solo mine while difficulty start rising, then I go with pool. So far, I think pool mining still works fine.
Well..... I haven't cared about my 290x for some time (amateur miner, don't have time to keep my eyes on rigs all time and keep track of all coins). So when I reply this, I checked my 290x states, and find I get quite more coins recently. And the difficulty is just 6 now!!! I will switch to solo tonight again, :-). It is kinda of like new release now... I may mine the alternative x13 coins you mentioned when it is launched, for a couple of days solo, but now I will stick w/ Maru.
Don't hit it too hard and get the difficulty up too much... don't force me to pool mining again, LOL. Just kidding.