ASIC is fatal for a privacy-oriented alt coin, because it means centralization, which means control of the coin ends up in the hands of the end-user's adversary.
Honestly, you could say the same thing about CPU coins. There are enough idiots out there with computers and who run unpatched software or download obvious malware that it's not hard to make botnets. Get enough mining for one entity, and you have centralization.
The possibility of centralization is not presently avoidable. The inevitability of centralization is presently avoidable. The reality is that what people do is trade off cost and benefit. What matters to me personally is that Monero privacy should become realistically usable, and not destroyed by avoidable threats. A defense-in-depth strategy is required to deal with unconstrained threats, to make the cost of defeating the system greater than the benefit of defeating the system.
