Quote from: Carlton Banks on March 21, 2017, 06:49:15 AM

Too simplistic gentlemen

And it's being discussed here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1833391.0

I am strongly in favour of switching the PoW hashing algorithm to Keccak, CuckooCycle, Equihash, or whatever has the best balance of proven hash algorithm & difficulty to develop an ASIC. And I think it should be done before any BU hardfork, any miners unhappy with that should've thought realistically that this day would come.

ASICs begone. The CPU mining revolution will be beautiful, Satoshi warned against the development of sole-purpose SHA256 hashing ASIC processors, and today we can see why.

All Bitcoiners will mine BTC with their regular PC again. Let's do it.

Every single PoW algorithm has a threshold over which special hardware becomes beneficial. Economies of scale. SHA-256 was a particularly poor choice in that respect. Scrypt didn't hold out much longer. Cryptonote is holding out, but also has a threshold. Hell, if you can do it with a computer, made of silicon, of course you can do it with special-purpose silicon !

However, the economies of scale to work out the chip, make prototypes, and put it on a board are such that only from a certain level of performance-over-CPU this becomes interesting. So on chains that will not go to the moon, CPU/GPU mining may hold out with a sufficiently sophisticated hash function. From the moment you hope to go to very high prices, and hence, very high block rewards, this investment will always become useful.

Point is, however, why try to get consensus over that with bitcoin ? If you want that, there are several alt coins *doing that already*.

You would have to modify bitcoin so profoundly that it is easier just to switch to another crypto that is already up and running than to find any form of consensus over such a profound modification. In fact, you can do it on your own, and publish a hard fork for bitcoin using such a function. But your alt coin will not take off. Better buy an existing one in the market.