>>60771745
>ASIC farms and manufacturers provide the literal perfect opportunities for seizure

Something the pro-ASIC crowd conveniently ignores. A POW security model that relies on specialized imported hardware nobody else has a use for is always just one policy shift away from getting pwn3d. You don't even need to 51% attack BTC to cripple the network, you simply enforce an embargo on ASIC importation/distribution and wait for the old ones to burn out. Any willing miners will eventually be forced back to mining on CPUs and GPUs, which will *drastically* weaken security on account of the inefficiencies involved: a top-tier GPU (e.g. RTX 4090) might manage ~1 GH/s on SHA-256, that's over 100K times slower than a modern ASIC. CPUs are even worse, measured in MH/s, a million-fold slower than ASICs. And that doesn't take into account the significantly greater power consumption, mining on CPU/GPU at today’s difficulty means you burn vastly more $$$ in electricity than you’d ever earn in block rewards or transaction fees.

Or if you want to speed things up you also cut off the power supply to industrial mining farms. And if you really want to make a point you conduct a coordinated global raid on said mining farms and commandeer the hardware to attack the network. All this is why the BTC mining sector lobbies so hard for concessions, they're forever begging the State for mercy because they know they're forever sitting ducks.

And that's an understated advantage of mining on general-purpose hardware: coupled with Tor/I2P it enables truly anonymous at-home mining, which is critical should mining XMR ever become legally hazardous.

Bottom-line: we can't afford Monero's POW security model to depend on permissioned access to specialized hardware, general-purpose is the only way.