The idea of changing our hashing algorithm when Scrypt ASICs arrive came up early on in the days of Feathercoin as one of the first points I made was that more Scrypt coins were needed with the advent of SHA-256 ASICs. Now we can see that Scrypt ASICs will soon become a reality.

It is clear that Scrypt ASICs are going to be expensive so the smaller hobbyist miner is going to have no place left on Scrypt based coins just like GPUs have no place on Bitcoin any more. Personally I purchased a BFL 60Gh miner which retailed for $2,599 is pretty much useless now (I sold 20,000 Litecoin to buy that BFL, fool on me!). Only those with deep pockets can mine Bitcoin and this will end up being just a few large companies. This does not make a good case for decentralisation.

The fact is that Litecoin rules Scrypt hashing and we compete with them for their hashes. We do not have a great enough share and I expect that we will suffer at the hands of those first few who own Scrypt ASICs. From history you can see that Terracoin got heavily abused by ASICs and had to hard fork to protect themselves, they went through this process as they got attacked by ASICs several times and were often left with crushing difficulty.

What made Litecoin in the first place was that it was at the top of the Scrypt tier of coins. When I started in crypto everyone could see that ASICs were going to become a reality so I moved directly into Litecoin. When ASICs hit all GPUs started moving over to Litecoin, now Litecoin pretty much own GPU mining. What we have here is an opportunity to be top in a new tier of crypto and move out of Litecoin's shadow.

There is the potential to be the next top GPU coin with a move to a new hashing algorithm. However the current choice out there is not the best, there are a few Scrypt-Jane coins which do not perform well on GPUs and some other coins choose a blend of hashing solutions like DarkCoin and Quark that will have trouble getting truly optimised for GPUs. A solution is required that provides the same efficiency of Scrypt for GPU miners and this should be achievable.

I spoke to Ghostlander last night who was talking about replacing Salsa and SHA-256 in Scrypt with Chacha and Keccak. There is a coin called Yaccoin out there that uses this but has variable N. The current flavour of Scrypt uses (1024,1,1), where Yaccoin uses (N,1,1) and N is variable which makes it inefficient for GPU as well as ASICs. Yaccoin was intended to be a CPU coin but was quickly ruled by virtual machines which could run hundreds of vCPUs.

I suggest that we earnestly look into a version of Scrypt with the same settings as the current solution but with replacement Salsa and SHA-256. If people were buying ASICs to mine Feathercoin I do not think that we could make this move, imagine if Bitcoin changed their hashing algorithm. People are not buying ASICs for us but for Litecoin mainly. Let's leave Litecoin to Scrypt as people have left SHA-256 to Bitcoin and move to a new tier where we can be one of the predominant coins.

We could feel safe if people were building ASICs for Feathercoin as the hashes will safe guard us but on Scrypt as we stand they are more of a threat. We cannot run from ASICs forever but right now it could well be the right choice and we get to stay in the realm of the regular user.

With all the GPU mining coming to Feathercoin we would be in a position to disable ACP. In case of attack people could enable by their own choice. You could imagine that this would not happen unless a Government decided to attack our network. It may appear completely redundant.

Let me know what you think.

Changing the hashing algorithm