I agree, but it's actually hard not to nerf scrypt, since it's time-cost and memory-cost are tied together. I'm not sure if they could have increased the memory cost sufficiently for their purposes, without making the time cost prohibitively high.

That's one of the things argon2 (https://github.com/P-H-C/phc-winner-argon2) is trying to fix, though I don't think any cryptocurrencies are using it yet (which is reasonable, it's just too young)

Instead of "deliberately", you might as well say "necessarily".

As I argue in [1], "in order to keep verification cheap, hash functions in Hashcash must restrict their resource usage as well. That’s why scrypt is configured to use only 128KB of memory."

To achieve ASIC-resistance, one should avoid Hashcash in favor of asymmetric proof of work systems, where proof attempts can take huge amounts of memory even while verification is instant and memory less.

[1] http://cryptorials.io/beyond-hashcash-proof-work-theres-mini...