Actually some company has released new scrypt miners and is not selling them to the public. Nicehash and all the other pools in the last week has seen scrypt tripled in hashrates.
Sucks that us little guys cannot get them.
THERE IS AN OLD, RESPECTED POOL THAT PAYS YOU TO MINE LITECOIN--
I can't remember its name just now, but it pays more than 100% for your hashrate. Seriously!
The secret? It merge-mines so many scrypt-algo coins that the other scrypt coins result in a more-than-100% scrypt yield for the pool. The miner can only get LiteCoin (LTC), all the merge-mined scrypt coins go for the profit margin. The miner gets a fixed percentage, 1% or 2% or something. That is to say the miner gets more than he would make mining LTC solo with no fee at all. And, this is while pool mining and submitting shares.
That is why I asked pinpins about merge-mining. No extra effort or energy is necessary to merge-mine multiple coins of the same algorithm. VertCoin (VTC) was the first to introduce this, and some scrypt coins and X11 coins are merge-mineable by design. It does take extra effort to code and set-up a pool for this. I'd like to know if YIIMP pools are compatible.
I hope that pinpins might answer... --scryptr