...conversation...
I'm not terribly vested in either ASICs or GPUs somehow winning in a contest of primacy. I own both, I just go where the mining winds take me so to speak. But it appears to me that true ASIC resistance is just not realistic. Whoever has the ASIC working on cryptonight V7 is not likely to reveal it and try and sell it. In fact, the previous ones were basically all unknown until monero announced a fork and then suddenly multiple companies had cryptonight ASICs for sale. Monero forking every 6 months is really just going to mean that the people who have the resources and ability to make the ASICs will control the mining and in the long term, also the coin supply. They may be prevented from marketing their miners but they won't be prevented from using them. So all of the people who are arguing that ASIC resistance and restricting it to GPU only is the real path to decentralization will be wrong. The hidden ASICs will dominate and control the coin, but it won't be so out in the open which arguably is even worse.
Maybe someone can geek out a way to really prevent ASICs but as long as the coin is profitable to mine, there will be incentive to figure out how to out geek around the ASIC resistance. Plus I am inclined to think that if it can be mined on a GPU then an ASIC can be created to do it better no matter what. It's just a matter of solving the technical issues.
Long term I have been saying for years that BTC will eventually give way to something else. At this point there are literally more than a hundred alt coins that are technically superior. But I would have expected it to start happening more than it actually has. In fact it still appears that long term success of every alt coin is still overwhelmingly dependent on long term success of bitcoin which is unfortunate in my opinion. I think a big factor in that is that to people who don't really know much about cryptocurrency in general, they are all just a nebulous "bitcoin" and the technical differences and advantages of one vs is another is completely lost on them. And long term, the success of any cryptocurrency will require more of the general populace to adopt it and use it.
