I'm curious. It was mentioned that there will come a time that Monero won't be doing the bi annual hard forks in the future as the coin becomes big enough that any hard fork could get risky. Does that mean ASIC's could come anyway?
If bi-annual hard forks are a known part of the social contract I don't see them ever becoming risky. Unless there is a fracture in the values, direction and vision of the core dev team, in which case it could make hard forks difficult even when Monero was still relatively small. Especially non risky if all they were doing with the fork was slight bi-annual changes to the POW algo. I mean imagine if some ne'er-do-wells rose up in response to a slight change in the POW algo and said "we are the proletariat and we are not going to take this any more, we are sticking with the old POW algo" they wouldn't be a threat, they would be laughed out of the room.