RE: ASIC Resistance is a MYTH : DASH is Conquered
According to the Ethereum white paper:
The current intent at Ethereum is to use a mining algorithm where miners are required to fetch random data from the state, compute some randomly selected transactions from the last N blocks in the blockchain, and return the hash of the result. This has two important benefits. First, Ethereum contracts can include any kind of computation, so an Ethereum ASIC would essentially be an ASIC for general computation - ie. a better CPU. Second, mining requires access to the entire blockchain, forcing miners to store the entire blockchain and at least be capable of verifying every transaction. [...] one notably interesting feature of this algorithm is that it allows anyone to "poison the well", by introducing a large number of contracts into the blockchain specifically designed to stymie certain ASICs.
It does sound good. Then again I thought using 11 different algorithms chained together sounded good....
At the end of the day if someone wants to build a device that can do it more efficiently than the average ETH miners PC then they will. Sure they might need RAM, they might need a copy of the blockchain, they might need some computational power....but it can be done. I'm sure it WOULD be done for ETH at the current market cap if they weren't planning to move away from PoW mining.
The "poison the well" thing is interesting. I'm curious as to how that would work and how it would be able to disadvantage a next-generation ASIC without affecting the average miners PC. It would need to be able to differentiate between the two. I am sceptical.