It doesn't matter if it is "reasonable" or not it can't be changed. It is what it is. Today the amount of economic activity on the network likely doesn't warrant that level of security (like buying a $5K safe to protect $1K in gold) but the move to ASICS is essential.
The high reward paid to miners indirectly funds the R&D necessary to make the move the transition to ASICs. Hopefully mining will be a large enough "pie" that we will see 4 to 6 well capitalized ASIC suppliers. 2013 is going to be an interesting year. If the network has moved to ASICs by the end of the year it permanently removes that "cheat card" vulnerability. Sure an attacker can still use ASICs to attack Bitcoin (but they always could) however they wouldn't be able to gain a massive economic advantage (i.e. $2M in ASICS 51% attacking $20M in GPUs).
The high reward paid to miners indirectly funds the R&D necessary to make the move the transition to ASICs. Hopefully mining will be a large enough "pie" that we will see 4 to 6 well capitalized ASIC suppliers. 2013 is going to be an interesting year. If the network has moved to ASICs by the end of the year it permanently removes that "cheat card" vulnerability. Sure an attacker can still use ASICs to attack Bitcoin (but they always could) however they wouldn't be able to gain a massive economic advantage (i.e. $2M in ASICS 51% attacking $20M in GPUs).
I like your point about the mining reward funding ASIC development.
The thing about ASICs is they have a higher efficiency than GPUs. So they will be able to continue mining even when the GPUs are no longer profitable to run. This means that the overall power use of the network could go down while the security of the network continues to rise. Good for bitcoin, good for the environment.
One way to look at it: the price goes up as more people save money using bitcoins. As they save more money, the cost to keep that money safe goes up.
