A cryptocurrency based on CPUs is just fodder for Botnet herders, like Bitcoin was for quite a period. Amusingly, that was Litecoins original call to action, "GPUs are too centralised, we can only be CPU mined!", except that they implemented scrypt very badly.
> I'd rather have that, than a few groups of people or governments owning a ton of ASIC's, or perhaps a few very expensive quantum computers in the future, that they can use to manipulate the currencies.
Any government worth it's salt has server farms with more CPUs and a bigger budget than you can imagine. It's not really a defence at all. Back when it was profitable, the operators at CERN used to mine to keep the cost of their servers down to a minimum, filling the spare cycles between computations. I imagine their systems are nothing compared with that of someone like the NSA.
> I'm not sure how it can be done, but some of the ones that claim to be CPU-only are using multiple hashing algorithms and ciphers at one, presumably to ensure that the task is too complex for anything less "general purpose" than a CPU (at least until they start making chips with accelerators for each and every one of those hashing algorithms?!).
Won't stop them being GPU or FPGA accelerated. I doubt anybody will ever care enough to do a custom silicon chip for any of the "altcoins".
Yes, I realize everyone with huge datacenters are a huge threat, too, but I still don't think it's as big of a threat as the alternative. Can the NSA own more than half of the world's CPU performance? I don't think so. Could they own 10-100 quantum computers that can mine at say 1 PH/s each? Definitely. It would be much more cost-effective for them, while prohibitively expensive for everyone else (a D-WAVE goes for $10 million a pop right now)
Granted, that's not actually viable yet, but if the world is going to move to a digital currency like Bitcoin, that implies it will be here for decades or centuries, and I think such a threat needs to be considered before it replaces most of the world's financial systems.
Even with ASIC's they could easily buy 1-10 million of them. It would only be a fraction of their annual budget, which will no doubt increase in the future, if nothing is done to rein in on their power. Normal people aren't going to buy ASIC's just to keep NSA in check.
Also, botnets would be there with or without Bitcoins. If they mine, at least they aren't doing something even more dangerous with the botnets, and keep them busy mining. Plus, it should be relatively easy to figure out you have a virus in your computer if your CPU is 100 percent 24/7 and the fans are spinning like crazy.
> I'd rather have that, than a few groups of people or governments owning a ton of ASIC's, or perhaps a few very expensive quantum computers in the future, that they can use to manipulate the currencies.
Any government worth it's salt has server farms with more CPUs and a bigger budget than you can imagine. It's not really a defence at all. Back when it was profitable, the operators at CERN used to mine to keep the cost of their servers down to a minimum, filling the spare cycles between computations. I imagine their systems are nothing compared with that of someone like the NSA.
> I'm not sure how it can be done, but some of the ones that claim to be CPU-only are using multiple hashing algorithms and ciphers at one, presumably to ensure that the task is too complex for anything less "general purpose" than a CPU (at least until they start making chips with accelerators for each and every one of those hashing algorithms?!).
Won't stop them being GPU or FPGA accelerated. I doubt anybody will ever care enough to do a custom silicon chip for any of the "altcoins".