When the BLAKE2b hard fork split from Bitcoin, one of its core selling points was democratising mining by abandoning SHA-256d for an algorithm that’s friendlier to CPUs and GPUs; the change promised to sideline the industrial ASIC farms that dominate Bitcoin mining and hand the network back to ordinary miners with consumer hardware.

It’s a compelling pitch. But there are no free lunches in Bitcoin; every decision has a trade-off.

It’s also a pitch that’s already been tried, tested, and defeated, with plenty of altcoins providing receipts — and the evidence is sitting in warehouses right now, in the form of Siacoin ASIC miners that are perfectly capable of pointing their hashpower at any chain running BLAKE2b.

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