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November 29, 2013, 08:47:39 AM |
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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.
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