An officially registered company, HashCoins offers two main types of cryptocurrency miners: SHA - 256 miners and
Scrypt miners.
With the powerful L3
Scrypt miner, Bitmain have expanded into Litecoin mining.
Not exact matches
First - time
miners who lack particularly powerful hardware should look at altcoins over bitcoin - especially currencies based on the
scrypt algorithm rather than SHA256.
Scrypt (which is used by altcoins like litecoin), was designed to be more friendly to CPUs (and unfriendly to ASIC
miners), so that a core elite of powerful ASIC users didn't get an unfair advantage.
Luckily for us at the BlackCoin Pool, there are many other different algorithms for
miners to sink their teeth into if
Scrypt is not their particular cup of tea.
These ASIC
miners were traditionally only built for certain algorithms, such as Bitcoin's SHA - 256 or Litecoin's
Scrypt.
Scan is offers custom frames for GPU
miners, so it only makes sense that it would consider
scrypt - based altcoins for payments.
From a technical perspective, DigiByte has a highly advanced system in which
miners can use any of five different mining algorithms including the popular SHA - 256 and
Scrypt, which are the algorithms used by Bitcoin and Litecoin respectively among others.
Also, it uses
scrypt as its proof - of - work algorithm, which is targeted to make it impervious to ASIC mining, though a number of companies say they are planning to launch
scrypt ASIC
miners sometime soon.
The use of
Scrypt was an interesting choice, because the purpose of using
Scrypt was to allow
miners to mine both Litecoin and Bitcoin at the same time.
Scrypt is a sequential memory - hard function requiring asymptotically more memory than an algorithm that isn't memory - hard, which means that you need more memory in your
miners compared to blockchains that don't use
Scrypt.
Scrypt also allows for a higher degree of parallel processing and is generally more accessible for new
miners than a more traditional algorithm.
Another reason why
Scrypt was chosen is to avoid giving an advantage to FPGA, GPU, and ASIC
miners over CPU
miners.
Litecoin's
scrypt hashing algorithm is another huge advantage for newcomers to the cryptocurrency market as it makes it easier for
miners to access the system.
So far in 2017, cryptocurrency
miners have taken over the market for consumer graphics processing units (GPUs), using the devices to solve the cryptographic puzzles required by ethereum (and other «
scrypt» - based cryptocurrency protocols) and claim their lucrative rewards.