It is pure ignorance to blame everything on ASICs.
1. ASICS do not lead to any more centralization than anything else. Why do you think we have a GPU shortage? Massive farms running GPU rigs, including mine.
2. All of these companies started developing altcoin ASICs after the market cap for them went crazy. Its not like you just create these things overnight.
3. If a company spends millions designing a product, just because one sector of the target audience doesnt want them, does that mean the shelve the entire thing? Manufacturers have no way of knowing ahead of time how the market will react. They build a product, put it out, and what happens happens. They didnt design these specifically to screw gpu miners or whatever stupid crap you guys think. Its up to the buyer to decide if they think a unit will be profitable. It is not the miner manufacturers duty to explain the entire mining ecosystem to a customer. Hell Bitmain even puts a disclaimer on their site BEFORE YOU BUY THE MINER. If people ignore the warnings and the historic trends they deserve to lose their money. Bitmain knows the ASIC will change the market for the algo in question, which is why they price different batches lower and lower, since the early adopter profitability just isnt there.
4. Realize that this is an ever changing industry, other wise it will stagnate. The problem is you guys all got into this when the profits were way overblown and now you are crying because you cant make a thousand dollars a month off of a single rig. So based on your lack of understanding as far as how the industry functions as well as the basics of economics, you blame the manufacturers.
The trends for miners to put out ASICs around the same time truly is strange as the OP points out...
But, I agree with fanatic 26 on some points, mainly the argument that CPU's and GPU mining are decentralized and ASIC's destroy this centralization is misleading or not quite accurate...
If the idea/assumption is that more CPU/GPU miners will spread out, and everyone can join mining, and each have a small piece of the mining pie, and with relatively low cost to start ... this leaves out the facts that -
1) There's still a
knowledge barrier to entry (knowledge of computers and mining software setup , mining hardware setup)... It can be learned but harder to learn than setting up an ASIC and plugging it in
2) There's still a
cost barrier of entry (yes ASICs cost more , but GPU's aren't exactly cheap and many people in the world can't afford CPU / GPU hardware to mine with)
3) As fanatic 26 comment points out, there's nothing to prevent a CPU/GPU miner with money from buying and scaling up to a very large scale hardware mining production with CPU/GPU hardware