I find all these threads about ASIC bringing about the downfall of bitcoin and/or crushing profit potential hilarious. Back when you could only mine with CPU everyone would freak out if someone had a gazillion cpus hashing away. Then along comes the ability to hash with gpu and everyone would cry OMG all the time and effort i spent setting up my awesome cpu mining farm have been for nothing. Now here comes the asic and everyone is doing the same thing that has been done everytime a new tech become available. If you want to mine with an asic go buy one. They really arent that expensive when you consider how much it costs to start a rig from scratch using gpus. Will the rich kids have an advantage? Of course dont they always? Does that mean you cannot even the field a bit? Of course you can. Im willing to bet that when tech changes again there will be a ton of threads once again complaining about everyones asics not being up to snuff because i can use this new and improved widget to hash at 4000Th/s or something. It is all a race to get to the end of the block reward. Enjoy the journey