Our primary goal is to create a program that gets beginners interested and attracts those miners not using ASICs, and delivers that mining experience with enhanced power and ease of use.
I don't think you understand. When the ASICs come out,
no one will be running GPU miners anymore, since they will have a very
very small fraction of the mining power they have today. There will be
no difference between your mining program, and a program designed to destroy video cards.
Why would you and a team waste time programming this?
Someone might run a GPU miner after ASICs arrive for a variety of reasons:
- Experiment with mining, if they haven't done so before, prior to dropping at least $150 on a dedicated miner
- Test out the stability of a GPU as part of a variety of tests
- Assure connectivity to a variety of pools
- Benchmarking purposes (benchmarking various mining clients)
- Mining coins with electricity they do not pay for and/or hardware they don't own
- Akin to playing the lottery with a 25 BTC prize
So, I completely disagree that
no one will be running GPU miners anymore. That's just a false statement. Heck, I could run my GPU for 5 minutes after ASICs arrive to prove you wrong just like that. You could say that very few will be running GPU miners anymore, which will most assuredly be true, but saying no one will is just plain wrong.
Now then, as far as monetizing such a client, I don't see it as possible to regain the $850 from casual GPU miners and experimenters only. ASIC support will have to be included in the software, and if it is truly a step above everything else that is available for free, it should be cake to monetize at that point. What ASIC miner WOULDN'T pay, say, $10 to gain an extra 2% efficiency? At least initially, when difficulty is still relatively low?
And I am curious, why would a mining client be obsolete once ASICs arrive? I didn't understand that statement. Mining clients will be needed regardless of what hardware is being used to mine.