This is turning into more of a crypto-currency blog than intended, but to be fair, this is the area I’m running active experiments right now so that’s a good reason to have so many posts in the crypto currency world.
Each crypto-currency has an associated hashing algorithm. Bitcoin and BTC derived coins are SHA256. There are others, this D3 unit from Bitmain is capable of solving the X11 algorithm at speeds greater than 19 giga-hashes per second. One might be tempted to think this is all about the hashes, but the markets matter too. Depending upon where one mines, there could be the capability to current market prices and select the coin with the greatest profit to mine for that time period. Prohashing does such a thing.
It’s early days yet on the X11 coins for me, but it’s been interesting to see the sheer variety of these things that exist in the world. In addition to Dash, the well known X11, so far we’ve seen CannibisCoin, MonacoCoin, OnixCoin, etc. pop up as active mining blocks.