Quote from: champbronc2 on June 25, 2013, 11:34:30 PM

Quote from: coinerd on June 25, 2013, 11:28:39 PM

Quote from: weav on June 25, 2013, 10:54:16 PM

Quote from: coinerd on June 25, 2013, 10:20:56 PM

ASIC Resistance is a real condition, but it has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO with the encryption algorithm in use.

It's simply an economic situation, and it's fluid.

Care any less to actually define your "real condition" notion of ASIC Resistance? I get that it's an economic situation, and fluid, though Grin

According to this randomly googled website the market cap of Litecoin is currently approximately $50,475,892.

I haven't spoken to a Fabricator however let's just go with some numbers bantied around the forum and say it's going to cost 5-7m (USD) to get your ASICs out of the FAB. This ignores the cost (a couple more million) of integrating them into a special purpose computing device to support the interfaces and off-chip requirements of the ASIC.

So let's just guesstimate that we're about 8m out of pocket and have a litecoin ASIC in our hands.

If anyone, I mean anyone finds out that it exists, miners and traders are going to dump Litecoin like a dead tree dropping leaves.

So now you're 8m out of pocket and practically the only person around to secure a dead block chain. Meantime people are fleeing every alt that uses any variation of Scrypt as fast as they can. Because let's face it, no one is going to do a scrypt ASIC at this point and then mount it in a device that can't handle variable n.

It would be self-destructive to create that machine right now. Your only hope would be to mass produce and sell the first round cheap enough to attract the current large litecoin holders. And you'ld probably have to let them pay in Litecoin, while the majority of holders were in the middle of a massive dump.

If you got a few people to buy, you could all sit around and transfer coins between yourselves. If you got enough, you might be able to start a process of recovery, But it wouldn't be the same, and you would get all the same "elitist" complaints and exodus of miners that bitcoin is getting.

So, there's a description of "social" or "economic" ASIC-Resistance for you. Absolutely nothing at all to do with the algorithm in use for the coin.

EDIT: totally unsubstantiated, but I guess if litecoin breaks ~200M - 250M USD market cap, we will see scrypt ASIC within months. For the same reason we have Litecoin - people sorry they missed the train the first time around.

While thats all sound in theory, Bitcoin said ASIC isn't death.

What was the market cap of BTC when the first -> RETAIL <- ASIC shipped?

1b +?

At the right time, it won't mean death. Right now, I think it would. If not for litecoin, certainly for a lot of small alts.

It would just result in a huge new flood of crypto-coins. Probably just using other features of scrypt-jane LMAO.