I'm interested in seeing a real explanation of the Dagger algorithm.

In brief: the only source I can find (that page) just contains a few sloppy lines of pseudocode. Where is real description and proof of its properties?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7115825

There's been further discussion of Dagger.

http://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/1vh94e/dagger_upda...

Not just in this link but in another that I cannot find, the devs seem to be leaning towards a bybrid PoW/PoS system like Peercoin.

Edit:

Quote was, "We will switch our PoW from Dagger to a hybrid PoW/PoS system to be developed via a bountied competition conducted by our university partners and open to the general community for participation." from https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=428589.0;all.

A hybrid system sounds reasonable, but I'm more interested in how they think that Dagger is ASIC-proof. I can't tell without a real description of the algorithm, but what is presented doesn't seem hard to parallelize.

Someone pointed that out to them, https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2014/01/17/ethereum-dagger-pow...

And now they've stated,

"We have made a preliminary decision that we likely will fund a contest, similar to that used to develop AES and SHA3, to determine the best ASIC-proof (ie. going beyond just "memory hard" as a heuristic) mining algorithm" http://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/1vh94e/dagger_upda...

Looking at the very bottom of that page, I do not understand how that function would prevent ASIC mining from being significant. You still need to compute a huge number of (SHA-3) hashes, and speeding these up could still make a significant difference, couldn't it?

I guess that in the limit, the speed-up is less relative to Bitcoin-style mining. Still, as long as modern CPUs are not memory-bound during computation of such hashes, ASIC miners would still win.

They will have the more interesting technical challenge of combining integrated hashing circuits with custom memory interfaces, though ;-)

Increased memory usage is directly related to the silicon size. ASIC mining could be more efficient, but not orders of magnitude so like with bitcoin.

I'm glad to see that new altcoins are making this sort of design decision. To me BitCoin's amenability to ASIC implementation is a serious design flaw (for the reasons outlined on that page).