I would love to see the ASIC freaks left holding the bag with all the flappy crap inside.
Quote taken from here: http://www.reddit.com/r/Hirocoin/comments/215lkd/changing_landscape_for_scrypt/
Quote
The GPU mining landscape is about to change drastically and many have not woken up to this fact. KNc recently took $2m in pre-orders for their 100MH Scrypt ASIC. These may start coming on to the network in Q2/Q3 of this year. There is no doubt that these will be turned on to many of the small Scrypt coins out there to strip them, sell the coins and then leave. This is going to leave many small coins unusable, many have less than 1MH. People do not seem to be aware of the problems this is going to cause and perhaps were not around for the SHA-256 ASICs turning up. This left many small SHA-256 at the time in a state where they had to hard fork to resolve the issues and others just disappeared. It is possible to move hashing algos in those coins.
Some may remember that Terracoin was a target for the SHA-256 ASICs, with the very large hashing power Terracoin was left no alternative but to hard fork its way out of trouble. For all that they tried to dodge the ASICs these devices were used again to run some very devastating attacks on Terracoin forcing them to amend their code again and hard fork. The additional hard fork was an exceptional case as their attempts to introduce smoother difficulty adjust left flaws in their code.
There other hash solutions out there the best known of these being Scrypt-Jane and Adaptive-N which for the most part are the same. They both use a variable N factor which is locked to 210 in Scrypt. This is the memory requirement, 210 works out to 1024 bytes. Vertcoin a very popular Adaptive-N coin currently uses an N factor of 211 which works out to 2048 bytes, every time the N factor goes up the performance of miners drops by half. Vertcoin currently has half the performance of Scrypt and has a maximum N of 232 which works out to 4GB, most graphic cards cannot even do work at that level and with the current hash rate the difficulty of Vertcoin could not go low enough to support that level of N. Scrypt-Jane and Adaptive-N may be ASIC hostile but they are also GPU hostile.
There is an alternative that has been largly over looked which was created by Even Duffield. This is the chap who created DarkCoin which looks to include the DarkSend feature that will allow anonymous transactions. X11 uses 11 well known and high performing hashing solutions chained together to generate the hashes required to generate new blocks. Since it uses 11 different hashes it is complex and unlikely to see a ASIC for it any time soon. The good news for miners is that they can use X11 right now to avoid multipools and start gathering coins that are going to become very important when the Scrypt ASICs hit. Mining X11 gives 3-4 times the hash power of Scrypt, uses less energy and generates less heat. This is the solution that people have been looking for.
There is also Hirocoin that has launched recently and adopted X11 as its hashing solution. Hirocoin does not have the DarkSend feature but has been meticulously coded and fully featured on launch including DNS seed and binaries for different platforms. DarkCoin uses an inverse difficulty reward which means that the higher the difficulty the lower the reward. More miners means less coins, Hirocoin is more conventional in that it has 400 coins a block and is likely to be the first choice for miners.
For all that there is the X11 alternative for GPU mining there does not seem to be any Scrypt coins who are seriously talking about changing their hashing algorithms. They may soon have their hand forced in the same way that Terracoin had no choice but to fork. However many small Scrypt coins do not seem to have an active developer in site, just communities of users who may soon be left without a working coin.
Some may remember that Terracoin was a target for the SHA-256 ASICs, with the very large hashing power Terracoin was left no alternative but to hard fork its way out of trouble. For all that they tried to dodge the ASICs these devices were used again to run some very devastating attacks on Terracoin forcing them to amend their code again and hard fork. The additional hard fork was an exceptional case as their attempts to introduce smoother difficulty adjust left flaws in their code.
There other hash solutions out there the best known of these being Scrypt-Jane and Adaptive-N which for the most part are the same. They both use a variable N factor which is locked to 210 in Scrypt. This is the memory requirement, 210 works out to 1024 bytes. Vertcoin a very popular Adaptive-N coin currently uses an N factor of 211 which works out to 2048 bytes, every time the N factor goes up the performance of miners drops by half. Vertcoin currently has half the performance of Scrypt and has a maximum N of 232 which works out to 4GB, most graphic cards cannot even do work at that level and with the current hash rate the difficulty of Vertcoin could not go low enough to support that level of N. Scrypt-Jane and Adaptive-N may be ASIC hostile but they are also GPU hostile.
There is an alternative that has been largly over looked which was created by Even Duffield. This is the chap who created DarkCoin which looks to include the DarkSend feature that will allow anonymous transactions. X11 uses 11 well known and high performing hashing solutions chained together to generate the hashes required to generate new blocks. Since it uses 11 different hashes it is complex and unlikely to see a ASIC for it any time soon. The good news for miners is that they can use X11 right now to avoid multipools and start gathering coins that are going to become very important when the Scrypt ASICs hit. Mining X11 gives 3-4 times the hash power of Scrypt, uses less energy and generates less heat. This is the solution that people have been looking for.
There is also Hirocoin that has launched recently and adopted X11 as its hashing solution. Hirocoin does not have the DarkSend feature but has been meticulously coded and fully featured on launch including DNS seed and binaries for different platforms. DarkCoin uses an inverse difficulty reward which means that the higher the difficulty the lower the reward. More miners means less coins, Hirocoin is more conventional in that it has 400 coins a block and is likely to be the first choice for miners.
For all that there is the X11 alternative for GPU mining there does not seem to be any Scrypt coins who are seriously talking about changing their hashing algorithms. They may soon have their hand forced in the same way that Terracoin had no choice but to fork. However many small Scrypt coins do not seem to have an active developer in site, just communities of users who may soon be left without a working coin.