Quote from: ckolivas on November 30, 2012, 08:20:01 PM

Quote from: Meatball on November 30, 2012, 03:49:36 PM

Quote from: ckolivas on November 30, 2012, 09:53:34 AM

What I really worry about, is that new hardware will continue to come out frequently enough that people end up on a cycle of investing in hardware that basically never pays itself off as slightly newer hardware and higher diffs keep coming out. Sure at some stage the limits of technology will be reached, but given the best tech at the moment is going to be 65nm ASICs when CPUs are 28nm devices, I can see the cycle going on for some time, and then even if btc mining ASICs end up in line with CPU manufacturers, they still continue to evolve over time. Dramatic profits from ASICs will likely only last a couple of weeks at most for a lucky few. The rest of you who paid for devices that don't even exist yet will not be making any magical profit no matter how big the hashrate appears. Your proportion of the total bitcoin hashrate will remain pitiful.

Sigh...

There's definitely some merit to this, but remember, the exact same thing happens with Video Cards, every 9-12 months the new GPU cards hit the market and are more efficient at mining. Of course video cards are much less expensive than the current round of ASIC's and can be resold.

The resale and multipurpose nature of them is what makes the equation so different though. My 7970s are selling for more than half of what I bought them for. Though I had to invest the money in the first place, there is still that extra return on selling them at the end, provided you don't try to keep them forever.

There is definitely a dark side to ASIC. Mainly this will depend on the business practices of the vendors in how willing they are to milk the market while depreciation is ever present.

Even with power consumption GPU was a relatively safe bet.

It's unfortunate that ASIC wasn't taken on in a community effort. ASIC's could have been marketed using a cost plus model instead of price point being indexed against price/difficulty.

The price/difficulty business model will suck (us dry).