Indeed. They seem to be switching out and tunable unpredictable memory access (i.e. have to spend a lot of money building an ASIC with a lot of die area -- see

Indeed. They seem to be switching out and tunable unpredictable memory access (i.e. have to spend a lot of money building an ASIC with a lot of die area -- see the scrypt paper to understand why: https://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt/scrypt.pdf https://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt/scrypt.pdf) for a faster but more "obfuscated" construction. The circuit needed to implement this will be more complex, but it will be much cheaper to mass-produce. In short, this is what happens when people who know nothing about cryptography try to sell their unexamined constructions.