Ranting about ASIC resistance
ASIC resistance fails because if a coin actually gets popular, someone will make an ASIC for it. The only thing stopping this is centralization on the dev team (see Monero and Ethereum) where they can easily change the hashing algorithm to prevent ASICs from gaining popularity. So you either have a maximilly decentralized protocol with ASICs or you have a centralized ruler.
Ranting about ASIC resistance
ASICs do not centralize mining any more than an ASIC resistant coin because mining for any popular coin will naturally gravitate to cheap and available energy, which is typically not residential (grid) energy. The only reason you don't see many mining farms for shitcoins is because they lose out to #bitcoin over time anyway, so they are not worth the investment to set up in the first place.
Ranting about ASIC resistance
The capital requirements of setting up a miner for an ASIC resistant chain vs an ASIC chain do not amount more decentralization because of the added security provided by ASICs. ASICs are a moat. General purpose computing, whether CPUs or GPUs, can be repurposed back to consumers, while ASICs cannot. An attacker must source and acquire machines that have a single purpose in order to attack #Bitcoin, and if they are successful, those machines will become worthless.
Ranting about ASIC resistance
But for an ASIC resistant chain, an actor pulling off the same attack would be able to resell their hardware, reducing the overall cost of the attack. ASICs are necessary to secure a large amount of value. Exactly what that amount of value is has yet to be seen, but as the ASIC resistant coins gain in value, the payout to attack them increases as well.
Great article here: https://medium.com/hackernoon/asic-resistance-is-nothing-but-a-blockchain-buzzword-b91d3d770366
Ranting about ASIC resistance
@ugmug this article is another good exploration of the viability of ASIC resistance: https://blog.sia.tech/the-state-of-cryptocurrency-mining-538004a37f9b
Spoiler alert: it agrees with your points here, and then some.