At Mining Disrupt Miami 2019, held July 23–25, 2019, Philip Salter of Genesis Mining had five minutes to take on one of mining's longest arguments: whether coins should try to keep ASICs out. His answer was that the fight had been lost every time it was tried, and that the real centralization risk lay somewhere the industry rarely looked: the software running on its GPUs. When this session was recorded, Bitcoin traded at $9,770; on October 11, 2026 it was $82,942.
Salter opened with the Bitcoin white paper, which describes proof of work as one CPU, one vote: everyone with an equal say. Nobody was thinking about GPUs or ASICs then, he said, but the intent was clear: mining power should be decentralized. Then the hardware moved on, from CPUs to GPUs to ASICs, and every attempt to stop the last step failed.
The Futility of Chasing ASIC Resistance
Salter’s central thesis was that the campaign for ASIC resistance was not just ineffective, but counterproductive. He laid out a historical timeline that served as a graveyard of good intentions. Litecoin launched in 2011 with an algorithm designed to be secure against custom hardware, yet an ASIC for it appeared three years later. Monero, which launched in 2014, saw its first ASIC in 2017. Ethereum, the most prominent GPU-mined coin of the era, also faced the emergence of ASICs, though they were not yet efficient enough to completely displace graphics cards. For Salter, this pattern was not a glitch; it was a feature of the market. The demand for efficiency always outpaces the desire for resistance.
the proof-of-work mining algorithm is based on the idea one CPU one vote
Philip Salter · 0:28
This historical inevitability, Salter argued, meant that miners and developers should stop treating ASICs as an existential threat and start treating them as an unavoidable component of the ecosystem. He suggested that the industry’s energy was better spent accepting hardware specialization while focusing on preventing the monopolistic behaviors that often accompany it. By refusing to fight the hardware, the community could redirect its efforts toward the software and economic structures that actually determined who held power in the network.
Why Home Miners and Data Centers Share a Future
A common argument against ASICs was that they favored large-scale operators, thereby centralizing mining power and excluding the individual. Salter acknowledged this concern but argued that it was a false dichotomy. He noted that while ASICs are indeed more efficient, the market for them has become increasingly commoditized. In the case of Bitcoin, for example, the proliferation of ASIC manufacturers has led to a more decentralized market than one dominated by a single hardware provider. GPUs, he noted, can be repurposed or resold, while ASICs lose all their value at the end of their life.
it's definitely true we've seen in the past then again whenever we see a mining ecosystem maturing
Philip Salter · 2:40
Salter emphasized that the true driver of centralization is not the hardware type, but the scale of operation. Data centers have inherent advantages in power efficiency, cooling, and maintenance, which make them more competitive than home miners regardless of whether they run GPUs or ASICs. He argued that trying to protect home miners by banning ASICs was a losing battle because the economic pressures of scale would always favor the larger operators. Instead, the industry needed to find ways to ensure that the benefits of this scale were distributed fairly, a challenge that required a different set of tools than algorithmic resistance.
The Hidden Monopoly in GPU Software
Perhaps the most provocative part of Salter’s argument was his critique of the GPU mining ecosystem. While the industry focused on the hardware war, Salter pointed out that a hidden monopoly was forming in the software layer. He observed that the GPU mining market was dominated by a few closed-source miners, such as Claymore, which were ubiquitous in the Ethereum mining community. This created a new form of centralization: even if miners owned different types of GPUs, they were all running the same proprietary software.
how decentralized really is that maybe there's something we can do about that
Philip Salter · 4:17
Salter argued that this software centralization was a greater threat to decentralization than the hardware centralization caused by ASICs. If the entire GPU mining ecosystem relied on a single closed-source program, the network was vulnerable to the whims of a single company. This was a problem that could not be solved by changing the mining algorithm; it required a change in how mining software was developed and distributed. Salter called for a shift toward open-source, standardized frameworks that would allow miners to choose their software based on performance and reliability, rather than being locked into a single vendor.
Accepting Hardware, Standardizing Software
Building on this critique, Salter proposed a new path forward for the mining industry. He suggested that the community should accept ASICs as a permanent fixture of the landscape while working to ensure that the market for ASICs remained open and competitive. This meant designing proof-of-work algorithms that were simple enough to allow multiple ASIC manufacturers to compete, thereby preventing the formation of hardware monopolies. The goal was not to stop ASICs, but to ensure that no single company could control the supply of mining hardware.
we should try to have algorithms deployed a new proof-of-work coins that are simple enough
Philip Salter · 6:23
In parallel, Salter advocated for the standardization of mining software. He argued that the industry should move away from fragmented, closed-source miners and toward unified, open-source platforms. This would not only reduce the risk of software monopolies but also improve the overall efficiency and security of mining operations. By standardizing the software layer, the industry could create a more level playing field where competition was based on hardware efficiency and operational excellence, rather than on access to proprietary code. This approach, Salter believed, would lead to a more resilient and decentralized mining ecosystem.
Genesis Mining's Open Source Bet
To back up his argument, Salter revealed that Genesis Mining was developing its own open-source mining framework. He described the GPU mining software market as a bit of a mess: closed-source miners competing with each other, each with its own approach, none compatible with the others. In response, Genesis Mining was working on a new platform aimed at supporting a wide range of GPU mining algorithms on the same hardware. This project was an attempt to bring back the flexibility and openness that had defined the early days of mining, when miners could easily switch between different protocols and algorithms.
we've got all these different closed source mining all these closed source miners being released in the market
Philip Salter · 7:28
This initiative was not just a technical project; it was a philosophical statement. By releasing an open-source framework, Genesis Mining was signaling its commitment to the principles of decentralization and community collaboration. It was an acknowledgment that the future of mining would be shaped not just by the hardware, but by the software and the communities that built it. Salter invited the audience to check out the project on GitHub, encouraging them to contribute to its development and to help consolidate the fragmented mining market into a more cohesive and open ecosystem.
He compared the effort to SGMiner, older software that supported a wide range of mining protocols in one program, and said Genesis Mining's project was an attempt to bring that back in a modern form. It was still in early development, he said, and on GitHub.