When there is an excess of supply of an artificially cheap product in the marketplace relative to demand, price falls, it's as simple as that. The ASIC vs GPU/CPU issue turns precisely on that very premise.
Admittedly, scrypt ASIC proponents argue that their main justification for ASIC miners is so they can optimize the mining of the most profitable coin at the moment, and then sell it ASAP in order to buy a more established coin like LTC or BTC. I don't think anyone will argue this point: scrypt ASIC exists to mine the "currently most profitable" coins at the lowest cost in order to immediately dump them in favor of the more established coins, or even USD.
What does that do to the less established, "currently most profitable" coin from a supply and demand standpoint? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to answer that question. Price is obviously negatively affected to the downside. In a word, the fledgling coin is CRUSHED by ASIC, whereas, in the absence of ASIC, the newer coin has an equal chance of gaining acceptance, theoretically even equality of status at some future date, as price rises in correlation to the rise in mining difficulty.
In theory, and in practice, on a level playing field, price rises in correlation to the rise in the difficulty to mine - that is what the concept of scarcity is based on. If all coins were always "easy to mine" (as the ASIC proponents meme "should be the case" goes), they would be worthless. Again, supply and demand, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist.
ASIC also centralizes mining and ownership, the exact opposite of the cryptocurrency ethic. Not only will ASIC eventually crush all the "lesser" coins by keeping their prices artificially low and driving the majority of small, ordinary users to some other alternative, the logic behind ASIC will eventually devour (if allowed) even the more established coins that their devotees covet, as they also centralize control in those coins while driving away the average Joe even from those coins as well. The end result would be a few individuals and organizations holding massive quantities of coins with only each other to sell to (i.e. worthless coins in the long run as well).
The coin that will survive is the coin that stays loyal to the cryptocurrency ethic, honoring the principles of wide user base decentralization and a secure network. It doesn't necessarily matter whether it's n-scrypt, or 6+hash, or something else that will come along later, what matters is the community's commitment to combat anything and everything that doesn't foster a decentralized and secure network that is as broadly based and widely accepted as possible (I don't think anyone would argue with that either.
). If the commitment is there, the necessary changes
will always be implemented when needed (using the technology currently available at the time . . . which is always advancing as well).
The cryptocurrency that is true to its design will eventually become more and more difficult to mine. That's life, and that's how they're designed! Price logically follows and rises accordingly given that supply falls as demand rises. That, of course, keeps miners in the game, even when it's to the stage of only "inflationary" coins, and the coin, the network, and users alike (
and their savings), stay alive and healthy. ASIC is the alt-coin cancer that destroys all that, the gang of termites that eat the foundation out from underneath the house. That "cancer" can be beaten by simply deciding on, and
committing to, who we're serving and how we're going about it, and I think that it all probably neatly starts with the answer we give to the following question:
who makes up that widely distributed user base and secure network, what technologies do the majority of those end users have at their disposal, and, when it's all said and done, do we really want to make a cryptocurrency that best serves their interests, or not?
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