Quote from: comsec on July 01, 2013, 12:23 amIt uses scrypt algo so was orignally designed to prevent ASICS from mining and to confirm faster than bitcoin for easy small xfers.It's not harder to get actually, at least not for me on #bitcoin-otc or BTC-E or vircurex Talk to tacotime on bitcointalk.org he's the one who came up with litecoin fork.There is the danger of too much centralization over time with the bitcoin miners if the bar for mining gets too steep. Ideally every bitcoin client should double up as a lightweight miner or something. Realistically today if you are doing bitcoin mining and you don't have ASIC or better mining equipment then you're not in the game. One problem is that there is only three or four ASIC producers, which makes a bottleneck the government could control in theory. Having one dominant mining pool probably would be a bad idea as well, although I'm less clear on what effects that would practically have so long as they were profit oriented, higher transaction fees? In any case any centralization leads to the chances of a malicious actor like the FBI taking over becoming higher, that much is certain.More generally scrypt and bcrypt are for cryptographic hashes, they can be used to make generating a hash very expensive which in turn makes brute force attacks on cryptosystems more expensive. Such things are of pivotal importance in deterring nation state adversaries such as the NSA from cracking codes. They have large amounts of resources, but not infinite ones.I know it seems like a minor tweak to the bitcoin concept, but nearly all technical innovations are evolutionary in this way, or to put it another way, everybody is a copycat if you look closely enough. Bitcoin itself is merely the composite of several different ideas thrown together. What is unique about its creation, is that SN saw the possibility of integrating them, not the ideas themselves, which are quite old. Bitcoin is a collage, not a creation. I am not endorsing Litecoin, because I have not examined it in any serious detail, but I believe the health of the cryptocurrency ecosystem is improved with each new addition of a cryptocurrency. This is partly because of diversity in of itself leads to evolutionary processes, but also that the side effect of diversity is robustness, a malicious actor cannot simply "buy" or "steal & lose" all the bitcoin, because then it'll be in a glorious arms race of speculation forever, cryptocurrencies with new block chains would spontaneously appearing everywhere.Having said that, I think Ripple is most likely a straight forward scam. It's proposition looks dubious, I like the idea in the abstract but it's been ruined by Chaumian founders obtaining vast amounts of ripples from the get go and is centralized. Decentralization and pseduoanonymity are the selling points of BTC, so I don't know what they're doing, I think it may have been around before bitcoin faced the byzantine generals problem and addressed it with its decentralized ledger we now call the block chain.tldr; some of the cryptocurrencies are almost certainly scams, but having many contenders for the cryptoanarchic crown is great.