Is asic-resistance obsolete? Since the early days of cryptocurrencies, we have seen attempts to utilize ASIC-resistant mining puzzles. The idea behind that was to keep rich influential custom-hardware manufacturers out of game and make mining viable on commodity hardware. But as it turnd out lately, all such current attempts are doomed to fail. And the actual higher difficulty of producing ASICs for ASIC-resistant puzzles brings even more corruption and controversy.

It feels like there's no point in trying to come up with some memory hardness anymore. There will always be one company willing to spend $200M on custom hardware, because in the end it does not really matter whether it's 10x or 100000x more effective. It's frankly not possible to stay competetive against it. Wasn't it better if all currencies just utilized Blake2, or dSHA256 right now? How did we even arrive in this situation? Did nobody anticipate it to happen if the Market-cap raises this significantly? Are there any new ideas or Mining-puzzles being provably nonASICable, e. g. some memory-superhardness or whatever, or is the era of evading ASICs over?
In the linked article the author describes in quite some detail the failure of asic-resistance. (Thank you @Jannes for finding it.)


  ASIC Resistance
  
  We’ve been pessimistic on ASIC resistance for a long time, and our journey into the hardware world solidly confirmed our position. Hardware is extremely flexible. General purpose computational devices like CPUs, GPUs, and even DRAM all make substantial compromises to their true potential in order to be useful for general computation. For basic hardware development, most algorithms can see substantial optimization just by taking away all of that generality and focusing on one specific thing.
  
  The vast majority of ASIC-resistant algorithms were designed by software engineers making assumptions about the limitations of custom hardware. These assumptions tend to be incorrect.
  
  https://blog.sia.tech/the-state-of-cryptocurrency-mining-538004a37f9b


It seems, on the basis that the article is both articulate sufficiently and, correct, that there is no actual hope for asic-resistance in any currency of potential future value.