I must be the only one here thankful for asics and not wishing anything but scrypt....
I agree with you. The network is having trouble as it sits now staying above 1Gh, eliminating those of of us like myself who do use scrypt asics to mine this will only further reduce it. I'm sure Devs will make the right decision, hopefully they also look at all options to solve the problem aside from changing the algo. I have enough emc2 saved up for long-term holding I will come out ok regardless if I can keep mining it. As opposed to a lot of other coins out there it is great to see the scientific value here.
There are a few reasons to switch. One I think is there is very much a perspective from average miners of difficulty to enter into mining with large scale ASICs. They tend to flood out those who are mining either via GPU or CPU. When one is trying to develop a broader community, and frankly market for a coin, the existence of large scale ASICs can in fact quickly kill this. When a critical point to longevity of a coin is building a strong community around a coin, having a barrier of entry which is accessible is critical. While there are still larger GPU farms out there, it does not necessarily match how quickly things can escalate with ASIC technology that pushes people out and away from participating directly. Introducing new people into the coin and community critical. Again what eventually happens is a small number of people end up dominating a coin with ASICs, largely those who can afford the high costs of large ASIC equipment. I am not sure introducing ASIC resistance would further reduce hash rates either, right now if anything there is movement towards the ASIC resistant coins. While it may move some ASIC miners off, it will also likely attract new miners as well, if anything the situation will likely be a wash, but possibly a gain.
In terms of network integrity, this is a big advantage with the x11 infrastructure, it has higher hash rates and lower power usage, without necessarily the problematic economics that large scale ASICs brings in. So you can end up having a better infrastructure, without necessarily pushing out smaller miners. That is why many are putting it forth as the preferred alternative.
In terms of the current hash rates, they have grown over the last two weeks, and this is not a pump and dump coin, so organic growth is generally beneficial. A rapid bump up to a high network hash rate that larger scale ASICs may bring in can be seen as unhealthy for the coins longevity, from both a market and community perspective. Bitcoin was not hurt by the ASICs, but smaller SHA coins early in their lifecycle were.
Right now the current generation scrypt ASICs do not present these issues, but the upcoming ones do present some significant problems. That is why it is necessary to discuss possibly forking the currency at some point, because these issues will eventually present themselves.
I will be honest, the more I find out about x11 personally, the more I like it.
Again, I am not speaking for the foundation in this. It's just my own opinion and analysis.