This came up in a different thread, and I wanted to talk about it, but not polute that thread, so, here I ask:

Does anyone think there will be another round in the bitcoin mining arms-race after ASICs have saturated the market?

I can’t see it. I think after ASICs are done flooding the market the difficulty will be so high there will be no way to justify purchasing mining hardware. Only people who’ve already made the capital expense will be mining - and some of those will not recoup their expenses - at least not for a long time.

I think this will happen on the first generation of ASICs from the current vendors.

Anyone see it working out differently?