For Zcash maybe, but for 0.5MSol/s VOT network only 50 such miners needed to get control over (or ruin?) the network!
Lets try some math.
Current VoteCoin network hash rate is 500 Ksol/s.
Bitmain's Equihash miner costs around $2200 including PSU and shipping, while the miner is capable of mining 10Ksol/s.
To get over 50% of hashrate of VoteCoin network, you need to generate another 500 Ksol/s.
You would have to buy 50 such ASIC miners, so the cost would be 110 000 USD.
(not mentioning that bitmain will sell only 1 device to a single user)
(not mentioning that having 51% of hashrate does NOT ruin the network at all)
If you want to get the same hashrate with GTX 1060 cards, you would need 1666 such cards (300 Sol per card), which would cost you around 400 000 USD today.
So ASIC gives you only 4x the hashrate for your money.
Not mentioning that once the bitmain's ASICs are released, the price for used GPUs will decrease rapidly and you may get 1666 such cards for say 200 000 USD while still getting several years warranty, compared to bitmain's 180 days.
In long term, the ASICs will consume less energy, indeed, so it will be more profitable that GPUs, but other than that, the advantage of having bitmain's ASIC boxes will be insignificant.
-Tom
What people are not understanding is that the real "cost" is the depreciation of assets.
So asic costs 3.5 times. But the energy consumed, which is a big deal in US and Europe but not in China, is also 3.5x less.
Everyone assumes equipment have zero resale value when they count the NOI. In my case I always sell my GPU cards for almost the same price or just a little less than I buy them on sale. Its like leasing a car, a Lexus has 65% retained value VS a Mercedes has 55%, GPU has 30% and ASIC miner has 0% after 3 years of use.