Quote from: CornedBeefHash on October 26, 2012, 01:53:12 AM

Quote from: whenhowwho on October 25, 2012, 04:02:39 PM

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

I think youre missing the point. Have you ever seen this thread? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=21112.0 Its in the Newbies section.

Its made up of new users to Bitcoin that are showing what they are hashing at using equipment they already have or they wouldnt be posting there.

These people already had CPUs and GPUs when they showed up here. How many will have an application-specific integrated circuit devise customized for Bitcoin when they first arrive here? No one! Newbies will never come to this forum again asking for help setting up mining software because a friend told them how they were mining for Bitcoins using their computer and earning money from their computers down-time.

Mining will become a specialty business at that point. Miners will be drawn from either existing users that are continuing their mining hobby or incredibly insightful entrepreneurial types willing to gamble on the possible payoff of a costly devise that will have very limited value after Bitcoin. How will this effect Bitcoin? I dont know but I can speculate that the outcome might be negative.

Of course newbies use what they have. Doesn't everyone? I mean it isnt really possible to use that which you do not possess. New people will always start hashing. Last year when the best gpu for hashing was a 6990 people didnt stop mining because they got all sold out. They continued with whatever they had or whatever they could get their hands on. Many new people try it with what they have and whenever they purchase something with their bitcoins or convert them to fiat they either decide to continue with what they have or they upgrade. That is another thing that will always remain true.

Im pretty sure you completely missed my point so i will restate it. Everytime the technology changes people complain and squeal doom and gloom. Yet the reality is people still mine with cpu's even though gpu's are so much better. People still mine with gpus even though fpga's are better or at least more efficient. Asics will come along whenever they finally start shipping and people will still mine with cpu's gpu's and fpga's. The difficulty will go up the network hash rate will go up but it wont matter people will still mine. Almost anyone can afford an ASIC of one type or another as they are not expensive and they are actually much much cheaper than building a gpu rig especially if you want to build one with comparable hash rates.

As for your statement mining will be a specialty business. It already is. Otherwise everyone would be doing it already. There will always be hobby miners and there will always be more profit minded miners. This will be true no matter what the difficulty rises to or how many times the block reward halves.