Quote from: metavox on April 11, 2013, 10:14:31 PM

Quote from: resma on April 11, 2013, 09:42:21 PM

Since BFL is not delivering, Avalon seems to have a monopoly in the consumer ASIC market, and the lucky receivers of their second batch are making far too much bitcoin in a short period, effectively giving them too much power in the bitcoin economy. There should have been more ASICS, or none at all... The current situation is not good IMO.

It would be helpful if the mining algorithm could be modified to minimize the impact of processor type. Supposedly litecoin was designed in address this. It might not be feasible for bitcoin to change that much at this point, but it's possible that Satoshi considered this early on and isn't concerned with the implications. Only if we see the network hash rate really spike, and make the difficulty jump with it, will we know the impact on the network as a whole. Smaller miners, like myself, might just bail if the block mining expectancy jumps by years.

I was a smaller GPU miner myself, however the current difficulty combined with the electricity prices here in the Netherlands, make mining unprofitable with a bitcoin below approx. $180. If BFL would deliver a 5GH/s box for $250, that would only consume some 5W power, mining would be profitable again for people not willing to spend a fortune on hardware. However, I don't think BFL will ever deliver...