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Ok, I guess I'm sort of confused... last I heard, Monero was "ASIC resistant"... couldn't you turn this pine64 into an ASIC to run a node and mine with by running monerodo on it, or just installing everything on there yourself and customizing it if you choose to do so?
Also, is it too late to buy the $15 version? It says that it's currently sold out.
There is no such thing as "ASIC resistance". What you can do (which Monero does fairly well) is to reduce the performance gap between different technologies (CPU -> GPU -> FPGA -> ASIC) and increase the cost of building the high-end technologies (in this case FPGA and ASIC). The result is that (i) ASICs are not worth building for a long time, until the price increases a lot (way more than Bitcoin price when ASIC became a thing), and (ii) The apparition of a new technology doesn't render the previous ones obsolete. You already see (ii) in action in Monero: you have GPU mining, but still CPU mining is worth doing. That was not much the case with Bitcoin because the performance gap was larger.
"couldn't you turn this pine64 into an ASIC": No. ASIC stands for "Application
Specific Integrated Circuit". It is build, at the hardware level in the fondry, to do only one specific thing, and nothing else. That raspy is build to be a general purpose device. You can't turn things to be an ASIC for this or that: either they are build for this or that, or they aren't.
