Taken from here: http://www.reddit.com/r/myriadcoin/comments/256r2w/why_i_have_my_eye_on_myriad/The biggest question in the alt community today is 'What can we do about Scrypt ASICs?' There are other important issues too, like privacy systems, alternatives to PoW, community, etc. But the biggest one is Scrypt ASICs because it's obvious they will have an enormous and lasting impact on the altcoin ecosystem in the near future.
Until about a year ago, nobody really paid any attention to altcoins. Namecoin was cool, and some were interested in Peercoin. That was it. Then Bitcoin ASICs came out, and over the course of a few months we saw a mass exodus of GPU miners who were now losing money. Everyone imagined it would be the death of GPU mining, but instead Litecoin saw a massive rise in hashrate (and price). In retrospect, it's pretty obvious that was going to happen. Why would people who invested time and effort into GPU mining suddenly give up when there's an option to keep going? They could keep GPU mining and flipping their coins to people who like Litecoin because:
There were and still are fears that ASICs, being all manufactured by a few small manufacturers and very expensive, are in the hands of the few = a more centralised network = vastly less secure, even if the hashrate grows exponentially.
Safety bet, reduced blocktime, and other lesser reasons for Litecoin investment I won't go into in this post
So GPU mining continued.
With the growth of Litecoin, people started actually paying attention to altcoins. But there was a problem. Sha256d ASICs were on the scene, so there was no point making a new sha256d-based PoW coin. The GPU miners were replaced by a much smaller group of ASIC miners, making the risk of 51% attack in a sha256d coin's infancy just too high. Thus was born the great Litecoin shitclone bubble.
Fast forward to today and Litecoin ASICs are coming out, and in the space of the next few months, just like happened a year ago, Scrypt GPU miners will be pushed out. Where will they go? To Vertcoin, to Darkcoin, Heavycoin, Myriad, ... well there's a number of options available, but they all take the stance of avoiding ASICs. And that's great because it encourages more distributed mining, more security, and more coins in the hands of more people. But how long can they run away from engineers with a growing incentive to mine more cheaply? Myriad is the exception to the others. It's the first coin that doesn't try to avoid or put off the ASIC problem. It instead slowly, carefully embraces and takes advantage of the situation.
20% of Myriads can be mined with sha256d ASICs (by the way your old ASIC junk is still profitable), and 20% with scrypt ASICs. The other 60% can be mined with GPUs (Skein, Groestl, or Qubit) and possibly even CPUs (Qubit, Groestl?). But let's say that Myriad takes off, as I think it will, and ASIC makers start to think about designing ASICs to hash Skein, Groestl, and Qubit. Each model they design could only possibly mine a maximum 20% of the coins. It took Litecoin a market cap of >300 million, some 600x greater than Myriad's today, for ASIC manufacturers to finally start rolling them out. And that was for a chance to mine 100% of the coins. If the ASIC designers wanted to get their hands on even a chance at cheaply mining the other 3/5 blocks, they would need to design 3 different models. That's a lot of work. And it means that, should there be ASICs available for all 5 of Myriad's algos, we will likely see a very diverse range of machines on the market, from probably a much more diverse range of manufacturers than we currently see in the Bitcoin and Litecoin ASIC markets. That diverse range probably means easy access and lower entry costs for miners. And there we'll have it, a world that didn't run away from the inevitable, but still managed to keep a well distributed network, a more secure network, a more democratic network, and one where wealth isn't as concentrated in the hands of the few.
So yeah. Myriad's kind of a big deal.
P.S. If I'm wrong about some shit, flame away. Don't hold back.
