You make it sound like I was stating an absolute -- I was just relaying an argument that I found fascinating when I initially found it :) That's all. I do think there's quite a bit of merit to the argument, but as you've just pointed out, it's not quite as definitive as it may appear at first glance. I hadn't actually looked into Litecoin at all, but after reading the first two sentences describing its proof of work, I guess somebody found an alternate proof of work that BTC mining hardware can't just take control of. I'm really not so sure though... from what I understand (which is literally what I just said I read), the memory requirements are nothing more than a speedup, not an actual requirement of the algorithm. You can just compute the value at RAM address XYZ when necessary instead of fetching it, and basically make the memory requirement completely vanish.That's actually exactly the same situation as you find with Bitcoins. It's possible to have every single possibility computed and stored in memory, and to just look up which one solves a block. It's preposterous to think you could do that with bitcoin mining, of course, but it's the same thing with both litecoins and bitcoins is what I mean. Bitcoin miners have to compute it because they don't have the resources necessary to hold all possibilities. Litecoins are different -- you can store all the possibilities of that step of the algorithm without always having to compute it, but you can still compute it if you want. The devil is in the details, I suppose: I'm not familiar enough with either algorithm to know why they're more dissimilar than they appear. I think it's a bit of a bad sign for Litecoin though that Wikipedia deleted their entry... hrm.The $30 to $2 crash was because of the high profile hacks (e.g. MtGox) at the time, wasn't it? I don't see how anybody dumping any amount of coins could see it plummet the way it did *and* stay down so low for so long, but I'm no economist.