Not too much different, but ASICs allow for more security at lower cost. It's a good thing all in all, even if the barrier of entry might be a little higher.

Just look at how Litecoin is doing. It was designed to be GPU resistant when Bitcoin migrated away from CPU to GPU mining. By placing limitation on miners being able to hash as fast as they possibly can, you are weakening the network and its value.

The problem as I see it is ASIC miners are expensive and the lower priced ones even with favorable KWH rates won't turn a profit for the average person. The issue isn't that Bitcoin needs to be ASIC resistant. The issue is Bitcoin mining needs to be accessible and profitable for more people who can't sink a bunch of money into equipment and power. Anyone can mine, but the incentive is only there for a small section of that demographic.

What happens when ASIC miners are priced out of everyone's hands except corporations and governments? Do we really want governments to accumulate more than us, to use their wealth and continue their human rights abuses against us? Do we think this stops on a Bitcoin standard?

Look at this: https://cointelegraph.com/news/satoshi-invented-gpu-mining-to-defend-the-network-says-early-dev

This Satoshi's statement:

like it or not, but is the anti-ASIC, in fact. And it's clear that since 2013 you can't just download Bitcoin and start mining.

Network would definitely look better in terms of decentralization if Bitcoin would be still mined on GPU.

But, as a curiosity - ethash was carefully planned as an ASIC-resitant algo, because their work was based on paper Hashimoto by Thaddeus Dryja (author of Lightning Network) https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Dagger-Hashimoto

So the necessity would be to have not ASIC-"resistant", but ASIC-proof design. (and I know how to design such algo, it seems... ;)

I think it wouldn’t make much difference because the difficulty would just adjust down if we were upper bounded on GPUs for mining

We would still have ASICs by now, and mining might be more centralized.

ASIC-resistance is a mirage. A device specifically engineered to only do one thing will always beat general computation devices. ASIC-resistance just makes it harder and more expensive to design one. Yet, as the exchange rate of Bitcoin increased, making one would have at some point been economically viable for someone. That manufacturer would then have had a monopoly on dedicated mining hardware and easily cornered the entire hardware market or directly the mining market. It is actually in our interest that the hashing algorithm is ASIC-friendly. It makes it easier for multiple producers to operate in the market and dedicated devices being the only viable hardware for mining means that miners are literally invested in the success of the Bitcoin project. Their hardware is useless for anything else, they cannot hop to other currencies as the exchange rates fluctuate or bet on multiple horses. An ASIC-friendly network also does not need to contend with sudden hashrate spikes from botnets turning their attention at the network and leaving just as suddenly.

Either way, the downsides of ASIC-resistance clearly outweigh the upsides. Introduction would have taken a hard-fork, disenfranchised a set of stakeholders in the Bitcoin network overnight by obsoleting all existing hashing investments, and yielded only uncertain benefits.

Lol it would be monero, and how long would it remain asic resistant, if you're not constantly changing the hashing algo eventually an ASIC will come into pay or they are and doing it covertly so might as well let them hash away

Honestly I've never understood ASIC resistance stuff. Monero claims this. If anything the Monero ASIC resistance to me proves there isn't nearly enough market demand for Monero. If there were, this resistance would be broken or worked around. I don't know enough about how this resistance works to say this for sure but I wouldn't trust it to work.

Here's what I don't get about it. What is this accomplishing? It doesn't accomplish decentralization if that's what people think. If demand increases you would have massive miners enter the space and figure out ways to mine more bitcoin. It seems to me that this only adds an unnecessary distortion to the system.

Tell me what I'm missing though.

ASICs are good because they make it so miners are all-in exclusively to Bitcoin. All the capital investment it takes to be competitive, and in hardware that only has one use, means that they are committed to mining bitcoin and only bitcoin. So they are less likely to fuck around and attack in some way.

ASIC-resistant is just a buzzword for shitcoins.

ASIC, as the name stands for, is an Application-Specific Integrated Circuit.

So, there's nothing in theory you could do to make an algorithm "resistant" to an ASIC.

Given any algorithm, you can design an ASIC for it. An ASIC is simply hardware made to run a specific algorithm as efficiently as possible.

One possible way to make something ASIC "resistant" would be to basically change the algorithm frequently, so that you don't have the time to design and build an ASIC. But that doesn't make too much sense to me.

Can someone tell me how ASIC or GPU resistance works please? Is it hacky / kludgy to implement? Can it be circumvented?

ASIC resistance does not really exist. You can always make the chip better, motherboard more efficient, etc.

Lets say it is possible, then its just moves to other infra