Since we're on the XMR/BBR topic again something that's always bugged me or made me curious at least is the fact that Bytecoin/Monero uses what sounds like a completely new algo(CryptoNight). Which sounds like a really odd choice to me considering what kind of testing and rigor all these other new algos(BLAKE, Grøstl, Keccak ect) have gone through via the NIST competition.
Obviously SHA-2 has been considered a huge success thus far and doesn't look to have any major attacks according to public information despite it being expected to be showing cracks by now(and thus the NIST competition to find 'SHA-3'). Of course no one is using SHA256 anymore in the altscene for obvious reasons, but BBR went with their implementation of ('Wild')Keccak which was the winner of the 'SHA-3' competition and thus went through extremely rigorous testing from some of the top cryptographers in the world.
Maybe I'm thinking this is a bigger issue than it is, but I would expect more people to be complaining about this novel algo that CN uses. Unless of course it's just one or more of those new NIST competition algos with their own name slapped on it. But it doesn't say that on the Bitcoin wiki or the CN website. For all I know it could be worthy of being submitted alongside all those other algos if the competition were still going on but I don't really know.
The algorithm has little value as a general purpose hashing tool. It is purpose built for proof-of-work.
The design is heavily influenced by the desire to resist attempts to massively accelerate it on GPUs or ASICs, or to put it another way, to ensure that similar-cost devices will perform similarly, at least for some period of time.
So far this objective has been largely achieved with GPUs. GPU miners don't outperform CPUs that much on a hash/$ metric and don't outperform them at all on a hash/W metric. It remains to be seen how well it does with ASICs.
Your point about testing and rigor is valid. It is possible to surmise that with some level of obvious competence having gone into the design, there may have been significant testing, analysis, and scrutiny. Or there may not. Since it is all shrouded in secrecy, we just don't know.
