ASIC COMING FOR X-ALGORITHMS: DARKCOIN WATCH OUT

First they came for SHA256, and before you knew it, you couldn’t mine any amount of Bitcoin with your PC anymore. Soon, you couldn’t even make money with a GPU rig. Then they came for SCRYPT, changing the game for Litecoin, Dogecoin, and similar currencies.
In response, in hopes of keeping the network truly decentralized and opportunistic for all, other algorithms were put together. X11, X13, X15, all of these are composed of a number of algorithms, the purpose being to outsmart application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). The first successful X11 coin was Darkcoin last year, which eventually topped $10 USD. The scarcity of the coin as a result of the difficulty of mining it was a large contributor to its rocketing value.
What is X11, etc?
Based on the Quark algorithm, which is widely accepted as a CPU-only coin, X11 was developed for Darkcoin. It is composed of 11 cryptographic algorithms, some of which (skein for example) are used independently in other currencies. X11 offers the advantage of insurance against a single point of failure breakdown in that it would have to have simultaneous failures of all eleven algorithms. Darkcoin and other X11 coins are typically mined by many powerful computers rather than networks of high-powered ASIC miners.

This post was published at Crypto Coins News on January 30, 2015.