Quote from: MagicSmoker on April 23, 2018, 11:06:17 AM

Quote from: tradingbuddy101 on April 23, 2018, 09:22:35 AM

Anyone who claims ASICS kill coins are out of their mind.

Look at bitcoin, the first ASIC PoW coin... Still going strong.

What happened to bitcoin isn't applicable for a number of reasons. Firstly, we don't know the counterfactual; i.e. - what would have happened to BTC had ASICs not been developed for it. Secondly, BTC was the *only* cryptocurrency when ASICs became available, so there was nowhere else for GPU and CPU miners to go. Thirdly, ASICs were adopted very slowly for BTC because its price was quite low and no one knew if it would really ever take off. Plenty believed it would, sure, but it's not like recent history where price went to nearly $20k US and dragged almost every other crypto with it, so now it is more or less known that crypto can be successful. Fourthly, the even more recent crash in crypto prices shows that prices can, indeed, do just that: crash. Since ASICs tend to be very expensive, especially the first batch, those that buy them have a very strong incentive to dump their coins as fast as they mine them to try to recoup the cost, and for a small market cap coin like DERO that can push the price down so far the coin loses all momentum, especially since GPU/CPU miners have been all but pushed out by the ASICs.

Granted, DERO is holding up rather well in the face of the ASIC invasion, but I, and many other long time miners, stopped mining it completely, and if the recent positive price action reverses and DERO trades to new lows because of relentless selling pressure I suspect that many of us once staunch supporters will lose interest and drift off to other projects.

Quote from: tradingbuddy101 on April 23, 2018, 09:22:35 AM

ASICs make any network safer at a higher cost efficiency. The fact that the companies that make them are unethical by selling them only after mining them for 3-6 months has nothing to do with ASICS, it has to do with those people. So instead of going after ASICs, which are only great, go after the companies that are doing unethical business.

The cryptonight ASICs (or many of them) were sold at discounts recently, this makes it highly likely that the hashpower coming from them is rather distributed

These points I mostly agree with, and have argued such before - ASICs can be a very good thing if for no other reason than they are usually much more energy efficient, it's just that the manufacturers are a bunch of sleazebags that are all but untouchable because they are located in countries where, shall we say, the rule of law is not paramount.

It would certainly be quite an interesting counterfactual world where bitcoin had been ASIC resistant from the start. For one thing the energy consumption of the bitcoin network would be even greater, by an order of magnitude probably, than it is now. Either that or it wouldn't have scaled up as much. It might have ASICs to thank for that.

Does the fact the majority of ASICS are probably not being used to mine a specific Cryptonight coin, but are instead being rented out on nicehash, change the reasoning here at all?

And - on a different but related note - is anyone worried about the future of Dero vis-a-vis the fact that it is a POW coin? The developers of Cardano and other "generation 3.0" coins, and for that matter the developers at Ethereum, seem to think the future is with POS. If Dero scales up isn't the network energy consumption going to end up being a problem?