The advantage of this new asic has practically been spent already before it publically went to market, I imagine. Any professional miner now using one, I say professional miner because asics are dedicated mining products, is currently looking at least half the year of mining before ROI is achieved. Anyone who has ever bought asics, knows that this time is going to increase with hashrate and that it will probably take much longer than the estimate which is based on an instantaneous calculation of what is currently happening. So it is unlikely that it is going to be an easy ride and the miners will have earnt the DigiByte they mine. By mining they will increase the network hash rate of the algorithm and therefore will increase the amount of hardware necessary to perform an attack on it, so improving security. What I am saying is that I do not believe this will be a disaster for DigiByte but that said, I wouldnt like the asic ratio to increase any further than this at this time. As DigiByte and Myriad grow, there will always exist a point where it becomes viable to develop and produce asics for the non asic algorithms. The network increases when this happens and is ultimately strengthened after the first mover advantage is negated. The same amount of coins will be mined whatever happens so I still fail to see your instamine argument. OC we can and probably will change algorithms that become asic when we become aware of them but I dont see that DigiByte is currently threatened. As I said in my opening statement, I think the damage has been done.
Yes, the worst of the damage has been done, but it's probably going to continue for a long time yet. No, it's not a fatal problem for DigiByte, but it is going to have a negative impact on the value and security of the coin. Whether or not ASICs can be avoided is still actually an open question. Of course specialised hardware can always beat consumer hardware, but that doesn't necessarily mean that if a coin gets popular enough it will always be profitable and worth the risk to manufacture ASICs. There are constantly new PoW designs coming out that attempt to be as consumer hardware-friendly as possible.
What do you do if say google decide to mine MYR yes-scrypt? Your community has to get up and running very quickly to keep it distributed but there are plenty of organisations out there with enough computing power to take advantage of anything non ASIC, if they choose. Just saying...