Quote from: bill.joy on December 06, 2013, 04:13:55 PM

Quote from: OneMINER on December 06, 2013, 03:37:37 PM

Potentially limiting mining to those with tens of thousands of dollars to spend in a pessimistic scenario. Going further, what if the ASIC producers refuse to sell? Self mining while protecting their ASIC designs in the courts.

There won't be only one ASIC designer. Don't worry about it. ASICs will drive the price of LTC much higher. The reason is simple: the initial few ASIC adopters will be very profitable since there rigs are faster, thus driving the price of ASICs high. As more people use ASICs, mining will become much less profitable. Miniers will then consider choosing between the following:
a) spending 2000 dollars to buy ASICs to mine just 2 LTCs in 3 moths
b) spending 2000 dollars to buy 4 LTCs

LTC price thus goes much higher. This is what we've seen in BTCs history.

By losing some miners, you will see more buyers of LTC. There need to be just enough miners in order to secure the network, not too many of them. But a successful currency needs more investors. LTC initially need to be GPU/ASIC proof in order to have enough miners to prove it is secure. But now I think there are more than enoughh miners.

Quote from: OneMINER on December 06, 2013, 03:37:37 PM

I'd rather not see a couple of data center type mining farms being the only ones hashing for litecoin.

If this would be a problem then BTC would encounter it first. LTC will then still have enough time to avoid it. Being a follower takes much less risk.

I disagree, I don't think there's a hard link between coin prices and difficulty going up. Your statement contradicts itself a bit there too. If prices were to go up because coins are harder to mine, then those mined coins would be more valuable. Making mining more attractive.

I think being reactionary and changing the PoW after the release of ASICs when centralization has become a problem would be a disaster. That just sounds like pure turmoil to me.

LTC was created to be as fair as possible. Attacking high priced custom hardware in the hands of a few in favor of consumer grade GPGPU mining available to everyone makes sense to me. The bar for entry is very low, easy for many to step over. If you have a PC you can start mining reasonably effectively with about $150. Litecoin will seem very different on the whole if you need to spend enough to buy a car to get in the door.

EDIT: Slight change to first comment