Another little tidbit for you... GPU mining didn't really impact the supply as much as people like to talk it up in the press. Maybe for a short while, but it was more just a lack of manufacturing than anything.
Because ethash is memory hard, older (4-5 year old) gpus are actually the most ROI profitable. It isn't the same nm hardware race as asics. People buying up the most expensive GPUs for mining were not helping themselves at all.
CPU based mining is kind of a shit show... less about people buying CPUs and more about bot networks being used to mine.
Not only is Grin the one coin, out of many thousands, that strongly deters speculation with its pure linear emission, but it did in fact have ASICs built for it (the Ipollo G1/G1-mini).
I still stand by what I said... grin doesn't have any demand (the price is in the dumps and it has no utility)... nobody is going to pay $9k for an asic to earn pennies. how many of those things have people actually bought?
I appreciate that you tried to make a coin and that your algo is actually pretty interesting... but it is also too bad you didn't do a memory hard algo and be in a position to capture the 18m+ GPUs that are about to need a new home.
ethash held out surprisingly well. certainly a lot of asics were sold, but it didn't fully knock out GPUs like say sha256 did with btc. where as grin... you changed your original tone on it and decided to embrace asics with specific changes to CC to support that.
The original Cuckoo Cycle turned out to be rather ASIC friendly; the Cuckatoo variant even more so. But it's the Cuckaroo variants that saw the most changes to make them substantially more ASIC resistant.
update: removed comment about ROI cause I didn't do the full maths.
That comment makes no sense, since most cryptocurrencies have no use except speculation. The price is low (well, no lower than Doge) because Grin deters speculation, and hence much fewer people are willing to speculate on it.
> ROI is 4300+ days
Based on what electricity price?
However, I think you could have multiple competing cryptocurrencies in the ASIC class, because the ASICs are not as generic as GPUs or CPUs, so they cannot be easily repurposed for attack unless they are FPGA-based (doubful).
Anyways, I'm looking forwards to the new supply of GPUs. Hopefully we don't get the same thing again with Chia hogging up all the storage on the market or Monero hogging up all the CPUs.