1. The most used contracts must be put on ASICs to get scaling, because Moore's Law is ending (unless POET rescues it), i.e. they will force more centralization of mining not less.
Intel is working on it for a long time it seems from this 2009 article http://optics.org/article/40732 and they can throw billions at it so I am not too worried about that. Apparently we still have years before we start hitting limits even with current old-school technologies.