ASIC Resistance
A design goal for a proof-of-work algorithm intended to keep ordinary consumer hardware like GPUs competitive with specialized mining equipment, to preserve broader mining accessibility.
ASIC resistance is a design goal for a proof-of-work algorithm, aiming to keep ordinary consumer hardware — particularly GPUs — competitive against specialized Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) mining hardware built and optimized purely for mining one specific algorithm. The underlying motivation is preserving mining accessibility and decentralization, on the theory that a network minable profitably with widely available consumer hardware resists the kind of mining-power concentration that tends to occur once dedicated, expensive ASIC hardware becomes the only economically competitive option.
In practice, achieving durable ASIC resistance has proven difficult: many proof-of-work algorithms specifically designed to be ASIC-resistant have eventually had specialized hardware developed for them anyway, since sufficient profit potential tends to motivate the engineering investment needed to build competitive specialized chips regardless of an algorithm's specific design. Some networks have responded by periodically modifying their mining algorithm specifically to intentionally break compatibility with existing ASIC hardware, trading long-term algorithm stability for a temporary reset of mining accessibility.
Examples
- A proof-of-work network designed with ASIC resistance in mind aims to keep ordinary consumer GPUs profitable to mine with, rather than ceding the field entirely to specialized ASIC hardware.
- Several algorithms originally designed for ASIC resistance eventually had specialized mining hardware built for them anyway, once sufficient profit potential justified the engineering investment.