Asics would be fine if they weren't a) the product of a monopoly and b) used in secret, driving up difficulty for everyone, before being repackaged and sold.

As for risk, what many people don't seem to understand is that they are figuring their ROI for the ASIC based on CURRENT--I repeat CURRENT--difficulty. Each new batch of 10,000, or 20,000, or whatever is released into the wild the difficulty will go up, earnings go down, and ROI extends.

I just saw an old Scrypt ASIC on Open Bazaar that did 20 MH/s or something--it would make about 18 cents a day now, but at the time it was released, was the cream of its crop.

GPUs get outdated to, but you can mine much more widely with them, sell them, and NVIDIA CUDA architecture is also in demand for rendering, ML, and such. And of course if FPGAs are to be the apex predator of the next generation, one has to think about saving for them instead.