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I'm just watching the Bitcoin Core vs Unlimited debate, and I wondered if you have plans to avoid the scenario what they are facing now.
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The issue there is not miners imo, miners are highly incentivized in Bitcoin success, they invested a lot, imo the issue is:
1. there is a dominant dev team developing protocol which they do not use themselves (you can find few debates between some of them and Roger Ver where they admit that they use Bitcoin occasionally, like once a month or so)
2.a there is no way for network to fire such devs because they are not paid by the network, they are paid by MIT, Blockstream etc.
2.b there is no way for coin holders to provably vote and show their support to one or another solution - twitter or forum polls, or even node count are meaningless
We, as a Core Team, are payed from the blockchain and we have clear indication of support, so basically all tools to resolve the issue are in place already.
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X11 ASICs are coming and they will get even better soon, making the CPU/GPU mining obsolete (I'm not a miner, we probably passed that point already). If that happens we can say that at least some kind of centralization will begin, which is - I think we all (users, masternodes, miners, developers) agree - not good.
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GPUs are no longer competitive
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/hashrate-dash.html
This "small" bump in May 2014 was CPUs->GPUs switch and it's been mostly flat till mid 2016 when ASICs entered the game, hashreate growth didn't stop since then.
There are some potential trade offs in GPUs -> ASICs transition like not everyone who have bought GPU would bought ASIC (i.e. less people are mining) but there are also nice benefits like 1. ASICs are useless for anything else i.e. miners are much more incentivized to keep network healthy. 2. network can't be attacked by CPU/GPU-botnets anymore and you get this feature "for free".
Also, I tend to agree with Andreas M. Antonopoulos on mining centralization in China topic - it is not going to last long, it's only can be sustained while ASICs are on their way to current microprocessor tech limit, so it's more profitable to mine right where you produce them asap because at the time they arrive somewhere else they are already outdated. Once ASICs catch up, it should become more profitable to ship ASICs instead of mining, so this factor of centralization should slowly go away too.
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I could understand the miners to became angry if the hashing was changed in a month or so, but what if the switch from X11 was announced well before it happens? Miners need to be able to calculate risk and potential return on their investment, but they probably don't expect to run their hardware for more then a year anyway.
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That's a good point, we definitely don't want to jump the gun here.
