At this point I think a move from PoW to PoS is the best scenario for everyone. Doing this would level the playing field substantially so that GPU miners can still be a relevant and part of the community. PoS would increase the amount of memory required for the ASIC to the point that external memory chips would need to be used. This would lower the performance of ASIC architecture, but would by no means render them useless or prevent future ASIC development. In addition, there are several security concerns pertaining to the use of PoW as recently pointed out by Ethereum’s founder Vitalik Buterin. He said the following:
“PoW is extremely expensive, and furthermore is fundamentally vulnerable to 51% spawn camping attacks with no effective strategy for recovering from one. Selfish mining is profitable starting at 25-33% hashpower, and 51% censorship attacks are definitely profitable.”
Is this alone not a reason to consider a move from PoW to PoS? When we add in the issue of centralization and exponential increase of network hash rate and difficulty due to ASICS, I think there’s more than enough ammunition to make this argument. At this point, I’m not sure why the ZCash team is hesitating, unless there’s some unknown security or technical reason. Having more folks in the ZCash community has many benefits and also helps facilitate the ultimate goal of ZEC being adopted as an actual currency that’s used daily.