what if, from the very early days, Bitcoin mining was made somehow ASIC-resistant?
to mean “in the first few month or years, but not from Genesis”. I would expect that OP would have otherwise stated “from the start” or a similar phrasing.
Also, don't most ASICs allow to switch between different PoW chains?
No, ASICs generally can only compute specific hash functions. Bitcoin uses SHA-256d. Most other networks use a different hash function, e.g. Scrypt (Litecoin Dogecoin), Equihash (Zcash), CryptoNight (Monero), X11 (Dash), etc. It’s generally a security issue to use the same hash function as a network with a much larger mining reward as that exposes the smaller network to majority attacks (aka 51%-attack). While there are a few other coins that use SHA-256d, their mining reward is too low for even a minuscule portion of the Bitcoin hashrate to profitably switch over. We briefly saw a lot of hashrate hopping after BCH split off, but even BCH’s mining reward is now around ~0.7% of Bitcoin’s.
Yeah, I understood
to mean “in the first few month or years, but not from Genesis”. I would expect that OP would have otherwise stated “from the start” or a similar phrasing.
No, ASICs generally can only compute specific hash functions. Bitcoin uses SHA-256d. Most other networks use a different hash function, e.g. Scrypt (Litecoin Dogecoin), Equihash (Zcash), CryptoNight (Monero), X11 (Dash), etc. It’s generally a security issue to use the same hash function as a network with a much larger mining reward as that exposes the smaller network to majority attacks (aka 51%-attack). While there are a few other coins that use SHA-256d, their mining reward is too low for even a minuscule portion of the Bitcoin hashrate to profitably switch over.
We briefly saw a lot of hashrate hopping after BCH split off, but even BCH’s mining reward is now around ~0.7% of Bitcoin’s.