@Carlton Banks: OK, now we established a communication channel, I think
. Your hopes for "randomly changing algos" are probably legitimate as it would be comparatively less profitable, compared to today, to use and develop ASICs. I am only a little bit skeptic, I think it should be tried if it's necessary, for now I think you convinced me that this would be better than Scrypt.
With all the talk of "ASIC resistance" in the thread, here is a thought provoking question. Is the mining "industry" that was built around Bitcoin beneficial for its sustainability and longevity?
A little bit of speculation (still without scientific foundation):
- Investments in Bitcoin mining are investments in Bitcoin's ecosystem, like it would be investment in exchanges or other service providers. So miners should have an interest in that the cryptocurrencies for which their miners are built (SHA256) are strong and see increasing usage (and value). If there is danger for Bitcoin to massively lose users, they could use their financial power to "back" it or try to solve the problems investing in a solution (e.g. in developers if a bug is found). However, as there was never such a situation, we don't know it. Until now I saw very little of such activity ...
- On the other hand, the same happens with all other investments in Bitcoin infrastructure. In that sense there is nothing special about the "mining industry", although they definitively add value that "backs" Bitcoin in some way.
- A dedicated mining industry means probably more professionalism and more specialized knowledge when it comes to the PoW "part" of Bitcoin's security model.
- One could speculate what would happen to transaction fees and questions like the "blocksize debate" if we begun to use an ASIC-resistant algorithm. If most (bigger) users were also miners (like in the beginning of Bitcoin's history) and "usage benefits" are equal or higher than "mining benefits" (e.g. most miners were also Bitcoin service providers or important users), then there could be a trend to declining transaction costs (fees), because the miners would "vote" for all improvements that decreased the cost for mining, running a full node, and transacting. For example, they could embrace sidechains (e.g. the Drivechain proposal) or extension blocks, but they would probably not vote for larger "mainchain" blocks because these would increase bandwidth, hardware and storage costs.