I am not sure if I understand the concern. Price, difficulty (i.e. net hashrate), and popularity go hand and hand since this is a free market. If DRK becomes popular enough for "govthugs" to even entertain the idea of developing private ASICs then the price must be MUCH higher and thus profitable to mine (even at a 5 coin reward).
You're still thinking like a rational, decent person.
Guv is not motivated by profit. It doesn't care about the price. It sees a threat to control of it's slaves and it will spend any amount of money stolen from those slaves to eliminate the threat. It makes way more money stealing, taxing, feeing. It'll blow 50mil of everyone else's money on a rack of custom ASICs to destroy DRK just for the sake of destroying DRK. It's not about profit.
If your coin doesn't move up to ASICs, you're handing "them" The Bomb that "they" will use to destroy your coin. The only way to defend against The Bomb is to be The Bomb. If your Value/mine rate keeps ASICs down, then your coin will be nuked by a custom, private, not-concerned-with-profit-or-cost ASIC. Period.
Tell me, what part of, "A one line change in the code renders ASICs instantly useless," am I wrong about?
You're not wrong about it. You're 100% right. I can write one line of code that will make the client send everyone's coins to my address... I can write one line of code to do a lot of things.
You're just not considering that it will destroy all trust in the dev/coin if it is done. You can't make huge changes in functionality like that down the road. This coin has morphed enough already... It can't afford to jack around any more. I don't care if its 1 line or 500 lines. Such a serious and fundamental change will fuck trust in the coin.
As with the coin cap choices that have finally been finalized, I beg, pick something and stick with it. You can't change something like this and expect the project to live. We have enough doofus trolls in here with their half-baked arguments who don't understand what they're talking about... We don't need to give them an ACTUAL reason to troll...
Code gets updated all the time. Everywhere, for everything. Nothing bad happens, in fact (usually) the opposite.
Implement a wallet autoupdate feature, and 99% of users wont even notice. Miners might have to download a new version of sgminer or whatever, but I don't see them complaining about it if it defeats ASICs and keeps them in business.
Nobody gets jacked around at all, except the ASIC developers, who've just wasted $millions.
DRK has to remain decentralised. What the eventual approach to that might be I don't know, but changing some code is nothing to be frightened of. A dev that
was afraid to make changes would be something to worry about.
I agree with half of this.
Changes have to be made. FUNDAMENTAL functionality changes have to be made up front and left alone. What if Windows suddenly stopped being an OS altogether and was nothing but an Instant Messenger client with no bootloader and networking support required a separate piece of software?
Changes, yes. But sweeping changes that re-define the whole damn thing, you can't do that to a cryptocoin and expect it to survive.
Yes, it has to stay decentralized, but you can't have decentralization at the expense of The Bomb. With diff already bottoming out, I fear that may be what we've got... And a fundamental down-change to diff calc will result in what is essentially orders of magnitude of inflation.
It's damn near impossible to predict, but at the same time, you better get it right because if you change it 1 or 3 years down the road... It becomes a completely different coin in one line of code.