Sorry, I am going a bit off-topic here, but I have seen you post your statement, that any coin that doesn't possess 51% of the world's hashing power (I guess you are going for the actual computing power that every household/company could potentially deliver) is to be treated as potentially highly insecure in several threads by now. While on a hypothetical basis this sounds all neat, dandy and logical, you don't seem to take into account that this kind of percentage will never _actually_ flow into cryptos by a level of even 5% or so. Your argument seems to follow the thesis that everyone that knows about cryptos and is probably even accepting them as a daily feature in the yet-to-be-seen future would actually bother putting a relevant level of personal computing power into it.
Don't get me wrong - I am not trying to say that your point is invalid - 51%-attacks are currently an easy option as the overall hashing power of the whole cryptocurrency scene is still laughable at, but the actual issue to me would be a relevant spreading of the _actual_ hashing power that is currently pointed at cryptos.
TL;DR: My point is that "world's hashing power" is a term that bothers me when you are using it. No offense intended.
You don't seem to realise how much massive advantage ASICs have over general purpose gear.
Try computing how many household GPUs it would take to match the power of just the tiny little amount of ASICs we already have in place.
Then for a laugh check how little difference all the household CPUs would make.
Basically the stuff that is not specifically designed as dedicated crypto mining gear hardly counts, and if it still counts that is only because we have only just a few months ago even started to actually deploy serious "not all that terribly clunky/ancient feature-scale" ASICs.
-MarkM-
You are correct with that, but especially your point about the superiority of ASICs bothers me when talking about a "world's hashing power". We won't be talking about the power of individual PC's or neat little mining rigs, but about professional hardware that is produced and used for the purpose of mining. This exactly isn't the world's hashing power, it's the world's potential hashing power in the form of specialized and thus more potent mining hardware. I am not trying to be a smartass here, your term just doesn't seem to reflect what you seem to be trying to address and creates the impression that you are indeed talking about every single piece of hardware that could be used for the sake of mining.
The second highest hashing power scrypt coin doesn't even have half of the amount litecoin does. Much less than half the miners mining litecoin could pwn more than one of the other chains at once while still leaving litecoin a clear majority of the scrypt hashing power.
Basically they are pathetic toys, they didn't even use a new different hashing method that the equipment used by the litecoin miners would not be as efficient at as the equipment used by the new coin's miners. Instead they from the start deliberately made a chain that even just a tiny fraction of the litecoin miners could PWN just for LULs.
Similarly when the scrypt coins started: they deliberately made a coin that the bitcoin miners could PWN for LULs any time without even buying new gear, the bitcoin miners could PWN it just with leftover obsolete equipment they otherwise would throw out or sell to gamers or whatever fergoshsakes. Oh great lets make a currency that can be PWNed so easily the attackers can put old dead junk to work to PWN it. Brilliant.
Kind of like saying oh lets make a new better armed forces that will serve the common people better than riflemen can, we'll use all those old black powder muskets to arm them, thats the ticket!
-MarkM-
