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.
I think your second scenario is inevitable. Eventually a faction will form for one reason or another. In fact I think we can already see the seeds of it some reddit posts, or considering MoneroV.
But just like bitcoin Monero has to survive this sort of turbulence. Whether scheduled hard forks survive or not is another question.
I guess what I mean to say is, what it really truly comes down to, is whether or not real talent is leaving to go with another fork. If its just outsider idiot opportunists who aren't even part of the existing dev team at all, like in the case of MoneroV, that fork is as much of a threat to us as Verge or DeepOnion. Really you can lump it into that category and just think of it as another one of those and the fact that it happens to be a fork of monero isn't really relevant. Then there is the kind of fork where moneromoo and fluffypony find themselves at an impasse, start butting heads and one of them forks the repository and they both proclaim that their fork is the real monero.
You cant homogenize forks. The first kind is no threat to us at all and as a matter of policy should be totally ignored, the second is a huge threat and everything in our power should be done to avoid it (short of one thing that I will argue against in the next paragraph). So if the first kind of fork, the MoneroV style fork, is resulting over and over again from bi-annual scheduled forks than I don't think that is much of a reason at all to cancel that policy. Should we try to stop competitors from developing crapcoins like DeepOnion while we are at it?
As far as the second kind of fork is concerned, all scheduled forks could really do, at worst, is expose an existing rift inside of our community and bring it to a head. They aren't going to create a rift. But honestly is willfully stagnating because there is a fracture in the values inside of our community the ideal response? It kind of just damns both sides of the argument instead of hopefully only the "wrong" side. Isn't is more healthy to just let that second kind of fork happen if it's going to happen but continue to push development forward on both forks rather than everyone just sitting around with their thumbs up their butts not improving the network because trying to do so "might cause a fork"?