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Alt-coins are now a dime a dozen and with only minor changes to generation rates, difficulty, and algorithms, they all tend to use the SHA-256 (bitcoin) or the scrypt (litecoin/tenebrix) hashing algorithms for solving blocks.

A friend of mine recently told me about Yacoin and it uses a modified version of scrypt so that mining via GPUs is currently "impossible".

What are the specific differences between the standard litecoin scrypt algorithm and the yacoin algorithm that makes yacoin currently infeasible to mine on GPUs?

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  • Scrypt-Jane isn't an algorithm, it is something that lets you change algorithms in scrypt more easily. I think some enterprising person will need to look inside the Yacoin source code to answer this. Good question!
    – Nick ODell
    Jun 5, 2013 at 18:51
  • Thank's Nick. I'll update my question to reflect this information.
    – RLH
    Jun 5, 2013 at 18:56

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The scrypt-jane modification allows the N in scrypt(N,1,1) to change. Litecoin uses scrypt(1024,1,1). GPU miners haven't taken this into account. But now you have the opposite issue. Instead of the GPU miners getting everything, it's the datacenters who have the advantage.

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