X11

There has been lots of chatter in the crypto-community surrounding X11.

If you have yet to hear about it, we are not referring to the Honda motorcycle or anything to do with the X Windows System. We are referring to the new X11 hashing algorithm for crypto-currencies. Some believe its the “algorithm of the future”, others find it too complicated and prone to errors.

Many miners have been forced out of the ‘mining race’, primarily in Bitcoin, because of the rapid advancement in the development of mining technology. CPU and GPU equipment is not as fast at processing transactions as ASIC equipment is. The more ASIC equipment attached to the network, the more the overall network hashing power increases, along with the level of difficulty. If you do not have the budget to keep your computer hardware up to date, or up to speed, your costs will quickly become higher than your profits. At that point you either have to take a loss, switch to mining a more compatible crypto-currency or upgrade.

Flow chart concept with a descision.As a result a lot of time, effort and resources have been put into the development of technologies and strategies that can prolong the takeover of ASIC technology. X11, because of its complexity, fits into this category. The more complex the process, the more time-consuming it becomes rather than power-consuming – which isn’t what ASIC was designed for.

X11 was first introduced to us through the crypto-currency Darkcoin which was released earlier this year in March, created by Evan Duffield and Kyle Hagan. In the abstract of the coin’s whitepaper it stated that Darkcoin uses:

“An improved proof-of-work using a chain of hashing algorithms replaces the SHA256 algorithm and will result in a slower encroachment of more advanced mining technologies (such as ASIC devices).”

X11 has 11 rounds of hashing and uses 11 algorithms: blake, bmw, cubehash, echo, groestl, jh, keccak, luffa, skein, sharite and simd. This is similar to that of Quarkcoin, which has 9 rounds of hashing from 6 hashing functions (blake, groestl, blue midnight wish, jh, SHA-3, skein) and was released in 2013.

Many miners who have jumped on board to mine the crypto-currencies utilizing X11 claim to be experiencing reduced power and heat generation with their equipment. For some miners this could simply be due to outdated or insufficient equipment. For others its the algorithm, which is barely friendly for GPU mining. In the Darkcoin forum one community member, LimLims, explains:

“The answer is that some kinds of processing are extremely easy to scale up on a GPU to 100% utilization. In distributed computing parlance, these are called “embarrassingly parallel” problems, because they are trivial to scale up on parallel computer hardware. X11 is relatively more difficult (compared to scrypt) to parallelize on a GPU with perfect efficiency. This is because the code has to coordinate 11 different hashing algos, each of which is computed in a different way and in a different timeframe. So hypothetically we might have optimized an X11 miner as well as humanly possible, but it still only manages 50% utilization of a GPU.

source: http://bitcoinbarbie.com/x11/

X11