@philipma1957;

Thanks for explaining that. I thought it was directed at me but I get your point.
It certainly feels like some are trying to discourage new people from getting into this but I guess I understand that if the market is dying. Like many things which were forged by the internet community only to be taken over by big business, the market shares get smaller and smaller.

However, I don't agree that people should be talking others out of doing something that is positive. Instead, people should be talking about ways of being able to get back on that horse, finding ways where big business can't always simply take over because they can buy K-Mart sized data centers and take the opportunities away.

Have people talked about combining resources? I don't know enough about this to speak but sometimes it takes people taking a step back to see the bigger picture.

What about distributed mining, where no one big company can take it over because it is spread out across hundreds, thousands of member systems? There are so many ways of clustering efforts these days, maybe there are ways of changing the course and pushing big business out?

I for one would love to see more community efforts which prevent big business from being able to take things over. I've seen it too many times now and it is sickening.