No worries. The coin is software. ASICs are hardware. A simple algorithm tweak proposed by the VTC developers and agreed upon by the community will shake off an ASIC. Even a change to N-factor schedule would wreak havoc on ASIC makers' business plans. As long as Vertans say ASICs are not welcome here, we'll be able to preserve the 'hobby mining' angle for a good while.
this is true for any alt coin and even Bitcoin. changing the hashing function is very easy to do but quite difficulty to get consensus on.
there are a couple of things about N-Factor I don't quite understand..
A) how to calculate memory usage for each GPU and host PC based on N.
B) how N-Factor would combat a smart ASIC designer that simply designed their chips with enough memory 2xN steps ahead of the current N so that they could effectively have an ASIC that lasted up to 4 years.
(typically as we have seen with Bitcoin ASICS.. ASICs don't even tend to last more than 6 months before they become obsolete)
in essence wouldn't it simply just push up the cost of the ASIC?.. not actually make the design all that more complex.. particularly if it were designed with HSA standards in mind.
I think what history has already showed us is that nobody even bothers with ASICs until the coin reaches critical mass, but that also means that when a coin like VTC actually does become wildly successful then people will start working on ASIC designs both covertly and overtly.
hmmmm....