maaku
commented
12 years ago Litecoin is an altchain created by miners who felt disenfranchised in the transition from CPU to GPU mining. It was a reactionary movement to the industrialization of mining: no longer could your average person participate and turn a profit; mining requires capital investment and technical know-how. That's certainly more true of FPGA mining, and will be true of the transition to ASICs as well.
I understand the desire for mining to be a participatory endeavor. However from a core developer's point of view the industrialization of mining is A Very Good Thing. It raises significantly the capital costs involved in mounting an attack, eliminates the advantage enjoyed by botnet operators, and centralizes security of the network into a federation of professional operators that you can work with. There really isn't a downside, from the network-operators' point of view.
It should be mentioned too that the consumer-friendly, GPU-hostile property of scrypt and related functions is a myth. Worse, it appears to have been a scam: it's been shown somewhat persuasively that one of the originators of the concept was GPU-mining from the start. Regardless, a public GPU miner for Litecoin now exists and it is now longer economical for the average person to CPU-mine. If litecoin has any lasting power, there will eventually be a run of ASIC mining rigs as well.
Finally, the most significant drawback to changing the proof-of-work function is that it eliminates our current path towards ultimate, long-term security: merged-mining with the support of bitcoin's large pool operators. While changing the hash function may or may not gain us security in the short-term, it definitely comes with an opportunity cost in our long-term security plan.
Litecoin successfully uses a CPU intensive algorithm called Scrypt, this might be a preferable to the standard SHA as it would make the block-chain harder to attack with the large GPU mining rigs that exist. Their may also be considerable upsides in energy consumption, hardware costs and a more evenly distributing mining in the population which may be beneficial for public acceptance.