The only way to keep an algorithm “ASIC proof” is to continuously keep switching it out through hard forks, which is what monero does. The miners may stay decentralized, but the nodes themselves all have to centralize around agreed upon changes, which is much more damaging than mining farms. Also, there will always be actors with access to more computing power than others, no matter how CPU based your mining is.

Mining is an economic business which benefits from economies of scale. Sure, you can argue that our current structure isn’t sufficiently distributed (although I would disagree) but either way, it doesn’t matter because users and nodes effectively pay miners through fees and subsidies. The miners cannot make changes and cannot collude to attack because ultimately if they did, the nodes do ONE hard fork and their entire businesses go up in smoke.

We probably agree more than we disagree, because I have nothing against people using monero. I just correct people who try and claim it rivals Bitcoin as money. I think that some type of system which uses moneros privacy structure but is denominated in Bitcoin would be incredibly popular. I understand that it’s fundamentally not the same as L1 Monero, but L1 Monero isn’t very appealing to me as a monetary good. At best, it’s a limited transaction medium with superior privacy.