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by yebyen 4819 days ago
GPUs these days have alongside their massive collections of ALUs, large tracts of fast local memory. That's why they are viable for LiteCoin mining.

ASIC implementations for Bitcoin will be based on SHA256, built with not a lot of internal memory that can be accessed without traveling across another bus. Those implementations will not work with LiteCoin or scrypt, which is memory bound. GPUs have lots of memory.

It's no technical advancement over Bitcoin, I agree, but it is gaining acceptance (the prices have maintained parity with Bitcoin growth) and it seems that your current investment in LiteCoin mining will remain relevant for longer than old Bitcoin hardware, just because ASIC developers working on Bitcoin problem all see LiteCoin as just a weaker Bitcoin clone.

That's not an argument against LiteCoin.