Re: Why ASIC's Should Not Be The Future Of Crypto Currencies
ASIC's are just going to speed up the process of centralizing the money, and making the poor poorer and the rich richer to an even greater extent than things are already.
I agree with this. Technology speeds everything up, even the stages of greed and elitism. Bitcoin has very much gone from a moral ground of "any schmuck can earn!" to "You need a week's salary of an investment to earn." to "Only those with the ability to take a large financial risk can earn"
That said, morality goes out the window when there is money involved. It will be interesting to see if there is a morality shift to alternate currencies and equally interesting to try to determine if it's a morality shift or a financial shift. There is a lot of money invested in hardware which WILL work with those alternate currencies. For the past couple of days, PPCOIN is running around 175% more profitable to mine than BTC so perhaps it has already begun.
I don't see the step towards ASICs as being morally questionable, myself. It's still "any schmuck can earn" in my book when there's $150 ASICs available.
$150? Who has $150 ASICs? You must mean in some not-so-distant future.
I don't believe that a $150 ASIC device would be worth plugging in.
Assuming we're in that future and the difficulty has risen... and assuming you don't have free electricity....
If the current $600 FPGA devices are $150, would they be worth plugging in?
There is no $150 GPU device which is worth plugging in now, never mind the future.
There is no $150 CPU which is worth plugging in.