I'm sure its an amazing solution but I'm wondering, what is the benefit to remaining with a single PoW function?
Not needing to modify the ecosystem for one.
There are a ton of dependencies to update: electrum, armory, android, ios,
javascript, c libraries, python libraries, and many more I don't know about.
My understanding is the whole purpose behind X11 was to be ASIC resistant.
And it did resist, for two years. Enough time for Evan to engineer a solution to mining centralization.
People who have made significant X11 investments have the option of mining and trading other coins.
Of course.
Why not fork again? Was is the downside?
As I mentioned before, changing a coins POW hash is non-trivial.
And in Dashs case, unnecessary.
There are much better ways to spend development time.
Just wanted to add, Evan said in the very beginning that he wanted X11 to hold off ASICs until Xcoin/Darkcoin/Dash had a large enough network to take it (and it does, the difficulty hasn't gone up that much). He was hoping for two years, and I think it's funny that he predicted well (he seems to bat 1000) Anyway...
Yes, no need to change algos, and it would be a nasty thing to do to the miners who have always supported Dash and bought the ASICs. It's not their fault that they want to increase their hash, it's only natural. However, finding a solution to centralization is very important, so I'm very excited to hear what Evan has come up with!
Even with centralization of mining, Dash isn't in the same situation with Miners who don't want to update because Masternodes have vito power. They can reject blocks if they're not paying out properly or, if we had to, not filling up the blocks, trying to put something in that wasn't approved by MN quorums... etc. Someone else will always do the job happily. So I never worried about this.
As for the list of things that you want from a coin, you get all of that with Dash, but you also get a whole lot more. You get instant transactions, privacy and soon super ease of use, easier than any other existing payment systems. Plus, we have arguably the best network in existence now. You could say it's better than Bitcoin because their "full nodes" are run by Chinese miners without bandwidth or by volunteers from home networks (no bandwidth) and their market cap is still 135 times larger and volume 61 times larger than Dash, yet we have nearly as many full nodes running, most of which are high quality, fast and large piped, dedicated nodes. Mine are on the basic side, they run on 4 cpu, 1GB memory, 65GB storage 1.5 TB bandwidth usage. It's really the memory that slows my babies down
