The Alternate cryptocurrencies forum is a mess.
Sic. Anyhow...
I would like to express my opinion about what's possibly the most important evolution I see.
Keep in mind I do not consider myself a crypto enthusiast. Privacy cool but I don't feel like I need more than what BTC does, asset exchange... what does that even mean? I'm not a trader either. I don't care about how this or that thing makes trading more or less awesome. I don't care about this.
That said.
It seems to me
multi-pow isn't getting enough attention.
Now, the degree of multi-pow benefits are still to be investigated but it seems reasonable those benefits are there and even when 2p-pow will roll out, multi-pow will allow broader adoption.
When it comes to decentralization VTC goes great lengths in ensuring it stays decentralized by the means of being committing to be ASIC-proof.
Multi-pow takes this one step further. Even if one algorithm gets centralized, the others still stand a chance of being fair to small miners. ASIC resistance is no more necessary.
It is worth noticing that algorithms can be more rewarding to an architecture instead of another: for example,
page 4:
- The ARX-based algorithms, BLAKE and Skein, perform extremely well in software.
- Keccak has a clear advantage in throughput/area performance in hardware implementations
- Grøstl and JH are considerably slower than the other three algorithms in most software implementations
I might add that long chained hashing (albeit useless cryptographically speaking) is inherently resistant to trivial FPGA implementations. We know CryptoNight is so far resistant to GPU, even though I speculate this won't last long. Hopefully some algorithm will take advantage of GPU unique features sooner or later.
So it seems reasonable there is (there will be) a set of algorithms which can be fair to all types of users.
When it comes to choosing a multi-pow coin... there is very little choice. Myriad, Saffron, Spectrum: as for the first I can tell the developers are indeed working towards to evolve the coin to some sort of platform - you might have read their proposed PolyMyr merge mining system.
It is unclear whatever this will work out or not, but at least those are benefits I can perceive and a step in the right direction in my opinion.
Last but not least, I get to play with various algos without making a gazillion wallets.