You don't need to explain me how using my computer for other needs amortizes cost. The whole point of my miner is that it's fire and forget. I mined while playing
Qbeh-1{2} but for some more AAA action I'm currently mining
and playing
Borderlands 2{3}!
I see things the other way around. Most people buy computers because they have other needs than mining. Most probably don't even consider mining when they buy it.
However if they later find they can earn a few bucks each month mining, while the computer is idle, why not. It may even turn out that mining will amortize the whole computer cost within a year or two, so this would be really sweet. Lots of people will join in to mine. So the mining reward is very important, if you want to get all these users. And you do want to get all of them, to make a coin secure.
Consider a coin with 100 million home-miners. That's pretty tough even for a government to attack. If not impossible. If the incentive is there, they will come eventually.
If you want fire-and-forget miner, most already are, they set priority to IDLE, or even a better way to do it is to set it to PROCESS_MODE_BACKGROUND_BEGIN (win32).
And you can tune it a bit, if it still hinders your performance, so you won't feel it at all when running (other than hearing the vents revving).
My current CPU is an AMD 450 X3. It does not seem to have the power consumption characteristics you mention. Besides, being passively cooled, I cannot run it full load for much time and I don't see any good reason for which anyone should buy more powerful stuff.
That in particular won't be too good, but the majority of cpus are decent enough to turn a profit, if the right reward is there. What I'm talking about is bringing mining to the masses.
GPUs have become proper turing-complete architectures about a decade ago therefore they can run everything a CPU can whatever they're efficient at this is another matter. Yescrypt is not compute-oriented and therefore won't be accelerated by compute-oriented architectures.
I'm not criticizing GPUs in general. But the fact is that the wide majority of users don't have a GPU that will turn a profit when mining. Once again, my goal would be getting *most* people into mining.
The advantage over purpose built mining rigs is simply security. You can't compete with the kind of computing power that all the average users combined would bring into cryptos.
GPUs are still ok, many users still have them, and they're readily available at your local computer store.
However GPU algorithms can be implemented into ASICs if the incentive is there, that's why they're evil. So it's easy for a government to attack these kinds of coins.
And the worst case scenario is bitcoin. Governments, have the ability to do a 51% percent attack on bitcoin right now at no cost, if they pass a law to seize all the ASIC farms.
You probably already know, but since it's a public thread, let me make the point that ASIC farms exist because of the economics of manufacturing and purchasing ASICs, you'll get them a lot cheaper if you buy this hardware in mass. You can even develop it, at this level.
And I believe (though I might be incorrect) that cex.io alone has enough hashpower to 51% attack bitcoin right now. If they're legitimate they have no incentive to do it, but still they put all the hardware in one place, ready for the government to seize. Hence, the evilness.