Quote from: bonker on January 18, 2013, 11:56:08 PM

Quote from: bitfarmer on January 17, 2013, 01:23:08 AM

As the ASIC miners start mining, and "outdated" miners go offline, does this not pose a risk to the network in the sense that there are fewer overall miners?

The network as it stands now is far more distributed amongst a greater number of computers & hardware mining. If the majority of these go offline due to obsolescence, in essence there would be a centralization of power to a far fewer number of miners.

Although the network hash rate will be significantly higher, the number of people involved will greatly reduce. Does anyone see a risk in this? Perhaps if the ASICs develop hardware issues in the future (I hope not) and cease mining operations, I would think the network would be very vulnerable to an attack. Granted, difficulty would drop and "regular" miners would return in a balancing act.

Is the efficiency and hash rate increase worth the trade off of a less distributed mining network?

The way I see, if the do exist then latest-gen ASIC's are going to be kept by the people that made them, for obvious reasons.

Mining will be done by a few corporate bodies and I suppose the entrepreneurs will shift focus to the service side of things.

Yup completely on target... well except for the fact that Avalon has started to ship (at least demo units are shipping).