Another thing is the general impoverishment and decline of productive power that can be papered over by centralizing the output of that production to hide the general decline. I don't think anybody is buying that we are richer than 20 years ago anymore.
And .. some of us just spent the same budget as we spent back then on PC’s, on Nvidia DGX gear …
It isn't the biggest technical concern and at least they have principles, but I expect something that looks like Monero + easy to mine will eventually appear and turn out to have an advantage in the real world. Although it is hard to predict because it isn't completely clear what (if any) impact the algorithm difficulty has in practice. But if there are big datacentre mining a cryptocurrency with dedicated hardware then that means there are people with skin in the game who want it to succeed. Seems like a better equilibrium than whatever the Monero people are aiming for.
Or do you mean higher block rewards? Don't worry, the value of the coin automatically adjusts to nullify that.
That is the "does nothing" argument. But compared to Bitcoin, having a general-purpose [0] ASIC seems like it'd make the network less secure - if someone wants to run something like a 51% attack against Bitcoin they first have to buy a ridiculous amount of specialist Bitcoin-only hardware that will potentially lose all its value after a successful attack. Also probably be a lot easier to track who did it.
Monero the equilibriums are less obvious. Does that matter? No, I don't think so, I still own a certain amount. But it isn't a helpful axis to experiment on and I don't see where the upside is meant to come from vs just going with sha.
[0] Edited, was special-purpose.
And hot ice cubes are a thing. They've made ice at up to 650K if the wiki phase diagram is any indicator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phase_diagram_of_water.sv...
I'm going to reiterate that you are the one who started calling a CPU an ASIC, I'm was just trying to match your language to be friendly. A CPU is technically as ASIC for a certain class of computable functions, so if you want to call it that I'm happy to as well. If you don't want to call it an ASIC we don't have to, we can just call it a CPU.
> A Monero mining ASIC is called a CPU, by design.
This is true. If you make a Monero mining ASIC, then you have made a shitty CPU. Off-the-shelf CPUs are the best possible chips for mining Monero with, and this is by design.
The Monero hash function works by generating random programs and then running them, so that you need to have a CPU to generate hashes, and all of the optimisations in a CPU benefit Monero hashing. If you build a chip that does this, you have built a CPU. It's even built so that the instruction set is irrelevant, because the same program is run thousands of times before a new one is generated, making the overhead of translating it to any needed instruction set negligible.