The more decentralized mining is, the harder the 51% attack
Therefore, you want mining that is about as efficient on a current CPU as it is on a high end GPU or even ASIC. That way big server farm investments scale up with a low integer factor -- compared to a Bitcoin ASIC farm which can be (IIRC) dozens of millions of times more efficient per dollar than your PC CPU.
Various strategies were considered and tested. The end result was really clever: create a simple virtual machine with specific characteristics (such as non-halting totality, and a syntaxless bytecode). The one-way function is simply to run the random input program to completion, and provide the output. In other words, be a CPU.
The algo was specifically released as a separate standalone so others could pick it up. But there is only one crypto that uses it. It's the one that actually encrypts the data on the blockchain, has hundreds of
I just checked, for the first time in probably 2 years. Huh. It's not even in the top 25 market cap anymore. But it's the only coin that IMO for better or worse matches the original Tim May style cryptoanarchist vision that Satoshi was gesturing towards. And I don't need to say its name because you know which one it is.
I bet anything China, Russia, and Iran are those so-called cybercrime groups. Check this BlackHat talk about catching the (at the time) biggest ever card fraud guy. Russian oligarch son. Guess what, he was one of those returned to Russia in an exchange with the Trump admin as part of "peace negotiations".
Cyberattacks are part of the low level war they are also waging via dragging anchors to cut Internet cables, throwing drones and jets into NATO airspace, and ofc disinformation campaigns.
So yeah they are leveraging the cybercrime aspect to further weaken USA / NATO / The West / Tolerant Inclusive Democracy.
not actually supported by real consumer demand
I work at one of the big companies involved in this situation. All I know is, we cannot deploy solutions fast enough for the number of customers we have much less the rate at which demand is growing.
Many are startups and many are big companies still doing pilot projects. It all could go away. But it is not just VC dollars and George Forman AI Grills; at least for the Fortune500 types, there is an awful lot of actual business efficiency being realized or they would not keep sending us money and requests for more capacity/lower latency
There is very little future in being right when your boss is wrong.