In the cryptocurrency world, lot’s of people are against the development of ASIC miners because of the fear that they centralize mining and put cryptocurrencies at a greater risk of a 51% or other attacks. These concerns are valid on a surface level, but overlook the incentives of miners.
If a miner has purchased millions of dollars of specialized mining equipment that will be useless (or significantly less useful) after an attack, that adds a massive financial cost to an attack.
With proof of work algorithms that can still be GPU mined, or coins like Monero that plan to regularly change POW to make it easier for GPU miners to compete, the cost of a 51% attack is simply the cost of the hash power (if you are renting) or electricity and operating costs for the time while you are running the attack. After the value of the coin drops because of the attack, you can go on mining other coins without a dramatic change in the value of your mining equipment.
If you have ASIC’s for a specific POW algorithm, an attack on the coin that uses that algorithm will make your equipment significantly less useful and as a result less valuable. Even if there is another coin that uses the same algorithm (like BTC and BCH for the time being) the value of the SHA 256 mining ASIC’s would drop dramatically after an attack.
That increased equipment cost is an important piece of the puzzle when it comes to assessing the risk of a coin that almost everyone ignores.
The mainstream view that it is a good thing to attempt to be ASIC resistant, is actually backwards and creates a great opportunity for rogue GPU miners to stockpile GPU hash power and successively attack coins that have low hash rates and high prices.
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