ASICs are bad. That's the pure and simple truth (at least from my point of view). Let me explain why.
When I say this, I am referring to the beasts which are able to pull out huge amounts of hashpower and cost almost as much as a car or a small apartment, not the things that you carry in your pocket. Almost everyone is able to afford the little ones and, honestly, they probably should get a couple instead of GPUs, because of the lower power consumption (we should all care about this issue). This is a good thing, but this is where it all ends, with the small, affordable ASICs.
When we begin to talk about pieces of dedicated hardware that cost upwards of 2000$ / piece, the pros end and the cons come into play. Not everyone can afford such hardware, because of this, the decentralization is being fucked right in the ass. Wasn't this one of the main reasons why the bitcoin was invented?
When the first ASICs appeared, the ones who made enough money mining bitcoins rushed to buy them, while the ones who couldn't afford them looked for something different (scrypt) to mine. Bitcoin still stands because it is THE bitcoin. IT was here first and everything that came after was build in it's image.
Currently it makes no sense to mine Bitcoins with GPUs, regardless of how many you have. This will happen very soon with all Scrypt coins too. People with GPUs will stop mining Scrypt and will look for other algos. The value of the LTC will plummet and it will never recover, because it is, at it's best, a copy of the bitcoin, which failed to keep up to it's purpose - ASIC RESISTANCE.
The most important thing that you all should understand is that it is not the LTC (or any other coin like it) that fails, but the algorithm itself. SCRYPT is about to die and, it will take with it every coin that keeps using it, because all of them are just copies of an original idea that fails to work as intended. And like scrypt, so will die each and every other algorithm for which dedicated hardware is created.
If you consider that you are backing up LTC by rejecting this hardfork, you are either fucking retarded, or have a pre-ordered scrypt asic on the way. Either way, bad news for you: you are only pushing the coin further to it's death.
I have (partially) read the official response from the LTC dev team and I have only one thing to say: Spineless cowards. Nothing great comes without risk, and you are refusing to take any. Keep this up and you will loose everything anyway.
I'm not saying that X11 is the answer. I know to little about it from the programming point of view, to be able to say if it will or not provide an answer to the ASIC problem, but it is so much more friendly towards the hardware, and this is the main reason why I love it.
With this being said, I hope that this fork will be successful, and I wish the best of luck in their endeavors to the people who are supporting it.
SCRYPT IS DEAD! LONG LIVE X11.