ASIC resistance and the demands of decentralization

In the original Bitcoin white paper, Satoshi envisioned egalitarian mining with commodity hardware, what he described as “essentially one-CPU-one-vote.” At the time, miners could use regular CPUs to solve blocks, and Satoshi believed using common hardware was a good idea. In December of 2009, when user ‘SmokeTooMuch’ suggested on BitcoinTalk that developers create a GPU Bitcoin miner, Satoshi said,

The average total coins generated across the network per day stays the same. Faster machines just get a larger share than slower machines. If everyone bought faster machines, they wouldn’t get more coins than before.