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This is factually wrong no? Bitcoin is asic only. The others all changed for other reasons unrelated to your thought.

My thought was that ASICs turned out not to be worth it for crypto mining because consumer hardware evolved fast enough to do it, while also being cheaper and having some resale value, while ASICs are useless besides mining and have no resale value.

So I'm extrapolating this same idea to LLM inference.

For the problems ASICs exist they vastly outperform general hardware. Typically both in absolute speed and efficiency.

But it's only possible to make custom ASICs when you have a specific problem to solve. For newer crypto systems they can vary enough parameters that building a flexible enough ASIC to recoup the investment before the algorithm changes and makes your hardware useless.

For problems where the problem to solve remain in the problem space the ASIC can solve there is no point to use a thing else.

You’re extrapolating on something that is false. Consumer hardware never caught up to asic.

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