Quote from: Baruch on July 16, 2011, 06:54:28 AM

As johnyj wrote above, a mid-range gear will mine about $50/month, if electricity cost is taken into account. That is not insignificant, but it can hardly be considered as making a living. Nice toy, though.
It is quite obvious that "small" miners (like CPU miners) will soon be squeezed out to leave the playground for super-duper, liquid nitrogen cooling system, large computers. This can be expected, if the demand for bitcoins grows. It is simpy a matter of the economy of scale - like in conventional mining for, say, copper.
That isn't quite compatible with the decentralization concept of the bitcoin itself.

Demand would then drive supply so manufacturers will produce faster/more hashing hardware (be it in terms of GPU or specialised add on cards), economies of scale would mean these become more affordable. Since it's a lot easier for 10,000 individuals to run 1~3 units each than a single entity trying to house 30,000 units, the general distribution of hashing power should still remain relatively decentralized... unless everybody goes join the same mining pool or something Cheesy