ASIC Resistance and Decentralization

Recent events in China have highlighted some of the fundamental issues around ASIC mining. While I know I am a bit late to the party but, as the CEO of Crypto Caverns LLC, a company focused on growing sustainably decentralized cryptocurrencies, I think it’s important that I address some of the existing arguments in favor of ASICs and explain why I believe that GPUs, or more accurately commodity hardware, mining is so important.

First off I want to discuss the argument that proof-of-work schemes ought to be as simple and dependent on raw computational power as…