Zcash appears to be demonstrating their lack of technical expertise on block chain related matters:
Additionally I was thinking that this Equihash can be trivially sped up on an ASIC because the Equihash algorithm is not memory latency bound and thus is bound on the sorting and computation speed and/or the memory bandwidth, which can be optimized with specialized hardware.
There is no publicly available optimized code for Equihash, so we don't really know to what extent it
is bandwidth or latency bound. There may be subtle trade offs between the two. We really need to see the memory behaviour of actual running optimized code.
1. You didn't address my electrical efficiency point, which I think is probably the most damning. I very much doubt that the memory power consumption will be even 1/10 of the computational power consumption. Thus an ASIC will be at least 10 times more power efficient, Don't I remember pointing out the same issue with your Cuckoo hash? What was your retort again?
2. I also very much doubt it will be latency bound (even after the 10X speed up of the computation), because optimized sorting doesn't have to be random access.
For any memory bandwidth bound, there is this:
Out of interest. Why does it matter for a coin which is currently in the alpha stage and only running on the test net?
Isn't the whole point of this stage to weed out issues like this and work on a more sustainable architecture before it ever goes live?
If it goes live with these issues then I would find it worrisome and quite comical, but I don't understand the point of complaining about a alpha stage.
Not sure his bedside manner should be of much interest. If the concerns, complaints, (whatever you want to ascribe to the general term of potential issues) are valid, it becomes a question of whether they are solvable? Can the current organization solve them in their current state? Are they willing to adapt (gain resources, change plans, etc...) in order to solve them? Will changing (organization, code, etc...) result in a the desired state or did the initial state render all possible future states failures? --think of an organism that you want to fly, but starts with the evolutionary traits of an elephant; it may get there eventually, but it requires a long evolutionary road and/or new sciences to be developed to augment the evolutionary process--hardly an efficient process.
My position is that the threat of financial information being at the whim of everyone with the knowledge, resources, or both, to exploit the average citizen into servitude (by means of control or theft) is of too great importance for bruised egos to get in the way of progress. Maybe a solution would be to focus on the facts as they are and not how they are served up.