It's exactly the same with the collective delusion of cpu only coins that are at the same time mined by gpu clients that cpu miners are unaware. "It's a botnet", "it's a server farm" etc... yep, sure. That's the kind of delusion that awaits gpu miners when unannounced ASICs will take over. When you've played your own card by stating your intention that you'll shift PoW algorithm when ASICs get out, then it's simply logical that when ASICs are made, they will not be announced. They will simply mine on the network while everyone complains about how unprofitable the coins have become compared to the electricity that they are burning (because ASICs will be taking the bulk of the profit, masquarading as GPUs).
The cryptocurrency networks are more about securing the networks than benefiting a sub-optimal class of miners with excessive energy waste and low hashrates, like the GPU miners. And let's be honest here: Most GPU miners simply "love" certain coins because they can mine them and dump them. They don't care about centralization but rather maximum profit. That's why they end up in the largest pools, hurting the coins that they are mining.
Similarly made ASICs for Bitcoin/Litecoin which do not go on sale, and used by a small group of persons for mining. The situation is even worse, because this small group is confident that no one will disturb them.
Those that do not go on sale, are not orders of magnitude faster than those who go on sale. They could be 2x faster or 3x faster. That's the difference between ASICs which aren't marketed and ASICs which are. But when you do it with GPU vs ASIC it'll be like 100x faster. That's a real problem right there. And what are you going to do if you don't even know it? You can speculate that its GPU power and risk a hard fork to another PoW that could leave a window of opportunity open for a 51% attack from a group which is serious about seizing the opportunity during the moment of transition in order to become the dominant controller of the blockchain. And if that 51% attack is successful and, say, the attacker does some pretty nasty stuff, the currency might be hurt badly.
I mostly agree. But i don't believe the chance for stealth asics to be very high. Used asics would be worthless and development costs would be very hard to get back on a few asics. As soon as the asic% gets too high they would run the risk of being forked.
It depends on the market cap of scrypt-N coins by that time and if their daily production is worth it. If the daily mining production of scrypt-N coins is like 1000 btc equivalent and the asic manufacturer can gain like 30% of them while masquarading as "gpu farms", it can work smoothly. It'll be like 150k USD per day income at current BTC rates rates. Over a month it'll be 4.5 million usd. And if BTC goes to 900$, double that.