Long-term, we believe that FPGA and ASIC mining is a positive development because it means that those who invest resources into Neptune mining will have an interest in its long-term success. It reduces the “drive by mining” by miners who only make mining decision based on hour-to-hour ROI calculations. Additionally, with sufficient ASIC mining, even all of the world’s GPUs will not be able to reorganize the chain.
Because of this, it the founders’ policy that the pow-guessing algorithm will not change unless it is found to be completely broken, a scenario we consider very unlikely. In other words, the Tip5 function that’s used for guessing will stay as it is.
Concretely, after discussing this internally, we agree that we want to give a strong guarantee that Tip5 stays as the mining algorithm and a weaker guarantee that the exact mining algorithm (about 10 Tip5 invocations) also stays untouched. Former, only to be broken if Tip5 is broken badly enough to make it unsuitable for guessing. And latter only with strong concrete arguments in favor of changing the definition of the block hash.
So if you’re wondering if you should go ahead and develop an ASIC for Neptune, know that the founders will never make changes to make your hardware obsolete, except in the case where a a catastrophic vulnerability in the Tip5 hashing function was found.