@zooko, I really don’t understand your position wrt ASICs.
You’ve just related an account in which two people and their companies engaged in a power struggle over the protocol evolution of a block chain, by wielding their hash rate as a weapon to each try to get their own way. And who had the highest hash power was in fact decisive.
That is centralization. A single individual’s opinion won out regardless of any technical argument for or against the change in question, or its effect on Litecoin users, because that individual controlled the majority hash rate on the chain – something that was irrelevant to the merits of the change. [*] This is precisely one of the things the ASIC-skeptical camp has been warning you about.
It doesn’t matter which specific side won in this case, or what the merits of Segwit are/were as a consensus change to Litecoin. It certainly doesn’t matter that the price went up. (Accepting Alex Ao’s description of Bitmain “blocking” Segwit is effectively picking a side you like, but that is really, really not the point here. I would be making precisely the same argument if Segwit had not activated on Litecoin because Bitmain had had more hash power.)
And then you encourage Innosilicon to lobby the Zcash Foundation to allow ASICs. In my opinion, this is not something that as the CEO of ZcashCo --which is a role that already has a highly centralizing influence-- you should be doing. If Innosilicon want to lobby the Foundation they can do so; they don’t need your encouragement or endorsement.
[*] Granted, part of the reason they were able to do this is that Litecoin’s consensus change activation mechanism, inherited from Bitcoin, directly uses the proportion of mined blocks within a window to gate activation. Zcash doesn’t use that mechanism. But there are less direct ways in which hash power would still influence protocol evolution for Zcash and related coins.