Quote from: soothaa on March 12, 2018, 01:59:04 PM

Quote from: MagicSmoker on March 12, 2018, 01:36:28 PM

This is my understanding as well, but one problem with increasing the scratchpad size to defeat ASICs is that it also reduces the hashrate of GPU/CPU miners; perhaps monotonically So that seems like a shoot-yourself-in-the-foot kind of solution.

Why is that a problem? If the whole network decreases hashrate by 50% nobody loses but the ASICs...

Because changing the computation - ie, tweaking the algo - renders the ASIC obsolete (the computation is literally hard-coded into silicon) and this won't affect GPU/CPU software at all (just change the code and recompile).

EDIT - sorry, I didn't address your actual rebuttal that if the entire network hashrate decreases then - presumably - so will difficulty. Yes, that may work.