Thank you for the amazing work you have been doing with FPGAs. I truly respect you for pushing the boundaries of today's mining knowledge.
So let's say that FPGAs turn out to be a healthy and profitable substitution to GPUs as we hope, so far Cryptonight is the only algo that was able to put ASICs out of the game for a while, this being said, won't ASICs just be developed for the remaining algos, beating FPGAs at what they can do best?
If so this leaves me thinking that FPGAs profitable work could then be allocated to Cryptonight, which is ASIC resistant as we speak, but as you have stated yourselfthis algo implementation is not the best mining use case for FPGAs and at that point once more accessible FPGA mining solutions are released and more FPGA hardware is purchased won't that put us back where things are now?
An expertly programmed FPGA can even compete with an ASIC on the same algorithm, although the ROI is not spectacular, it is still worthwhile to mine. For example, the VCU1525 can make a decent profit even while mining Myriad-Groestl (Baikal X10 ASIC), so even competing against a dedicated ASIC, the FPGA can still mine with profit, although the ROI will not be maximized (ROI when competing against ASIC's is 1-2 years; ROI when mining non-ASIC coins is 50-150 days).
However, some algorithms like Timetravel8, Timetravel10, X11Evo, X16R, X16S, they change the algorithm every block. An FPGA can rapidly reconfigure itself to optimize itself each block; an ASIC cannot. Therefore these algorithms are truly ASIC-proof, in that no ASIC can beat an FPGA (ever) on those coins, unless the ASIC itself is just designed as an FPGA which would be a waste of money since you can just buy ready-made FPGA's.
Once I publish the website for the DIY-FPGA mining, I will strongly push new crypto coins to go with one of those dynamically changing algorithms, since they are the only ASIC proof algorithms and they would guarantee decentralization in the future world of DIY-FPGA mining.
I will publish an X16R bitstream which can do Ravencoin at an incredible rate; however these dynamically changing algorithms are extremely complicated to implement in FPGA's so it will be early 2019 by the time I have that one ready.
