YACoin Resurrection Hard Fork – Heliopolis
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-Unique algorithm. Sticking to its roots, YAC will maintain the inventive scrypt-chacha (aka scrypt-jane). NFactor will be set at 21 to be ASIC resistance but also mineable for many CPUs and GPUs.
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I was hoping to better understand this.
Currently (pre hard-fork) the N-factor was set to be increase on a fixed schedule. After the hard-fork I believe it will be "set" to 21.
What are the plans to increase the N-factor over time? As technology improves so will the mining capabilities. Litecoin for example - was "GPU proof" and shortly after home graphic cards became powerful enough to mine. Following that the "scrypt" algorithm became ASIC territory. I'm sure we don't want something similar to occur to YAC down the road. And to increase the N-factor when 'ASICs seem to be getting close' seems arbitrary.
Is there something in the protocol to handle N-factor increases? Or can it be included?
The debate over ASIC resistance has been raging on for quite a few years now.
I think it's best to think of 3 categories: !) ASIC-proof 2) ASIC Resistance 3) ASIC friendly. And really, there is a spectrum in between.
Bottomline, the most important aspect is adoption. The hashing algorithm should be decided on what is the most optimal way to achieve mass adoption. Under that premise, it was decided to go with NFactor 21--not the increasing NFactor schedule up to NF30. There will be a lot of discussion on why NFactor 21 was chosen.
Meanwhile, everyone will be able to mine with their CPU running the core wallet. You can set "gen=1" in the yacoin.conf file. That was erroneously removed in previous version, but YAC 1.0.0 has it back in.