The simple question that answers the future of alternative cryptocurrencies

[aarqa]

ASICs will come.  They might not be that powerful, but they will come because people will buy them.  People will buy them because they remember or read what they did for bitcoin and will hope for the same thing with scrypt coins.

By the same token, gpu miners who don't want to pay for ASICs will remember what bitcoin did to gpu mining.  Even if they are not that powerful, many people will panic.

So the question is this: What will gpu miners do when ASICs get here?  If they think ASICs are peeing in their pool, what do you think they will do?  Do you think they will just give up, sell their mining equipment and say they had a good run?  Or do you think they will find something more resistant to ASICs, such as Nscrypt?

Your answer to that question should guide your future strategy.

Consider this, also: you can say that ASICs manufacturers will just design newer ASICs to mine Nscrypt.  And you may be right.  But new algorithms can be written and distributed faster than new ASICs can be designed, tested and distributed.  New algorithms can be written and distributed much, much faster.  ASICs cannot keep up.  A very possible scenario is that ASICs will get here, people will leave regular scrypt coins, and ASICs designers will start to see that they can't keep up.  And at that point new ASICs design will sputter and die.

You may come up with different answers to how people will react to scrypt ASICs.  Let your answer guide you in the future.

[markm]

This is all aimed at miners though.

Who gives a damn about miners?

The only thing that makes miners important is securing the blockchain.

So ask whether people will prefer to use an insecure currency, one whose blockchain cannot be secured because any stupid meme can pop up overnight with more hashing power than it has, or a secure blockchain, one that is not vulnerable to a bunch of idiot kids armed with CPUs and GPUs ?

Years ago it was realised that blockchains are almost impossible to secure; even with merged mining they were not certain they could get enough hashing power to be secure; so they moved to Open Transactions for now until they have enough transaction fee volume to feel confident they could obtain enough miners if they moved back to a blockchain format. Since now new things other than blackchains are being tested maybe they will not ever need to use blockchains.

Look how well they have done in the years since: http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

-MarkM-

[s1gs3gv]

This is all aimed at miners though.

Who gives a damn about miners?

The only thing that makes miners important is securing the blockchain.

So ask whether people will prefer to use an insecure currency, one whose blockchain cannot be secured because any stupid meme can pop up overnight with more hashing power than it has, or a secure blockchain, one that is not vulnerable to a bunch of idiot kids armed with CPUs and GPUs ?

Years ago it was realised that blockchains are almost impossible to secure; even with merged mining they were not certain they could get enough hashing power to be secure; so they moved to Open Transactions for now until they have enough transaction fee volume to feel confident they could obtain enough miners if they moved back to a blockchain format. Since now new things other than blackchains are being tested maybe they will not ever need to use blockchains.

Look how well they have done in the years since: http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

-MarkM-

Troll, nada mas.

[aarqa]

This is all aimed at miners though.

Who gives a damn about miners?

The only thing that makes miners important is securing the blockchain.

So ask whether people will prefer to use an insecure currency, one whose blockchain cannot be secured because any stupid meme can pop up overnight with more hashing power than it has, or a secure blockchain, one that is not vulnerable to a bunch of idiot kids armed with CPUs and GPUs ?

Years ago it was realised that blockchains are almost impossible to secure; even with merged mining they were not certain they could get enough hashing power to be secure; so they moved to Open Transactions for now until they have enough transaction fee volume to feel confident they could obtain enough miners if they moved back to a blockchain format. Since now new things other than blackchains are being tested maybe they will not ever need to use blockchains.

Look how well they have done in the years since: http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

-MarkM-

Why, yes, it is aimed at miners.  And since one of the main points of digital currencies was to have something decentralized, and since ASICs tend to make things more centralized, we should all care about GPU miners.  GPU miners are more important than just securing the block chain, they are important because they keep it decentralized.

If we follow your train of logic, all cryptocurrencies should go away except for bitcoin because they might "have enough hashing power to be secure".  And look how decentralized that is.