hey

[PGPpfKkx]

fail

[CoinBuzz]

Hi,

I have noticed that newer altcoins announced use scrypt over sha256. Is there any inherent advantage in scrypt or is it just to protect vs asics?

Scrypt is more costly to 51% attack. So theoretically Scrypt coins could be more secure a bit.

[An amorous cow-herder]

I wouldnt count on scrypt being "ASIC-proof". The whole "chips are cheap, memory is expensive"-idea wont hold. Sure, you will need to dedicate some chip estate for memory bandwidth and possibly a big cache and the speed difference wont be as extreme as for SHA256 chips, but if LTC or any other scrypt currency really takes off you are going to see scrypt asics sooner or later.

[Rodyland]

People use scrypt because double-sha256 altcoins got royally screwed when people with huge hashing power used that power to mess with the altcoins.  Forking chains, double spends, ramping up the difficulty and then leaving the altcoin with high difficulty and no hashing power, stuff like that.

When litecoin was first introduced it was sold as a cpu-only coin, and being gpu resistant (if memory serves there were no asics back then).  Then people figured out how to gpu-mine scrypt, and bitcoin asics were common, so they rebranded litecoin as asic-resistant.

Of course, litecoin (and scrypt) is only asic-resistant as long as it's not worth the time/money to build an asic to mine it.  Now that litecoin is around US$20, I wouldn't be surprised if there are some enterprising young folk out there working on scrypt asics.