As it turns out, ASIC resistance might actually not be that great of an idea.
It’s still an ongoing debate.
In a non-ASIC-resistant system, ASICs tend to dominate the network, suppressing regular people.
One common mantra in the early days of Bitcoin was “1 CPU 1 Vote”: the idea was that mining was truly decentralized, with all nodes on the network having an equal say in validating blocks.
The rise of ASICs has since diminished this, effectively giving some people more votes than others.
ASIC-resistance brings back this idea of democracy, and decreases mining centralization in the network.
A common counter-argument on the other hand, is that since ASICs are designed solely to solve a cryptographic puzzle, they’re incapable of anything else.
Miners who own ASICs are thus committed to the network.
Their hardware only has value in the network their ASICs were designed for.
If a system with a large amount of miners relying in ASICs switches to an ASIC-resistant algorithm and then the exchange rate of the cryptocurrency crashes, many miners will suddenly be left with useless electricity-gobbling hardware since they have no incentive to mine anymore.
ASIC miners have already committed to the network by buying their ASICs, so they do not want to do anything that would disrupt the network.
Mining pools have historically disbanded once they’ve gotten too large, since the news of a mining pool with a large amount of hashpower would decrease trust in the network.
This idea of useless hardware and wasted hashpower leads us to our next slide.