Quote from: Kryptox on December 22, 2013, 12:53:38 AM

Quote from: coins101 on December 22, 2013, 12:45:05 AM

Quote from: Kryptox on December 22, 2013, 12:23:12 AM

Quote from: coins101 on December 22, 2013, 12:11:51 AM

Quote from: fendlestick on December 21, 2013, 11:50:46 PM

Quote from: Kryptox on December 21, 2013, 11:43:30 PM

Quote from: kireinaha on December 21, 2013, 10:36:00 PM

They'll barely get a ROI given that the difficulty will soon rise again. Would have been better to just buy $2 million of coins from an investor.

That's fairly narrow minded. Diff increases, but so does something else. Think hard enough and it might come to you.

I am going to guess network hash rate? Grin

I guess he means price. That was hard work, should have put an ice pack on my head while thinking about it.

My 2 cents worth - Difficulty increases, but so does something else - the fully diverse p2p nature of the system.

Of course I was being a bit sarcastic.

I'm wondering what you mean by the fully diverse p20 nature of the system. Adoption?

I just keep thinking that the higher the efficiency, the power and cost of every new generation of equipment, the fewer miners will be out there because they can't compete. This seems like we will soon know where the Bitcoin mining hubs are - 15% of the network is expected to be in one place in Iceland according to this report. Others my follow.

When you know where the majority of the hubs are, you stop having a true p2p system and instead you have something where governments can go and unplug the network. That would be ok if there are enough networked pc's out there to take over, but what if the majority switch off their machines, sell their equipment, etc?

I'm not an expert in these things - I just think it looks a risk factor for the future stability and prosperity of the currency.

You have a point. The transition to ASIC's scared me just for this reason. Bitcoin is going through a period where security has declined substantially since the days of purely GPU mining. It's changing though and I feel that it will diversify further, just give it some time.

If Bitcoin survives this, it's only going to strengthen it in the long run.

I think we more or less had a false sense of security because nobody had developed it yet and bitcoin wasnt really big enough for anyone to care. if anyone had developed the most crappy of crappy ASICs possible they could have dwarfed the network at the time(same for cpu->gpu). the fact we have people developing, building and releasing ASICs now means were gearing up towards the limit of technology. Even if some major force released a ton of advanced ASICs. if the current developers wanted to keep making money they would be forced to drop price and produce more advanced stuff. i think we could easily fend off most attacks on the system, even if it were a govt trying it. Worst case... i think these ASIC developers could sell them nearly at cost if it meant 'letting bitcoin die and losing its value or getting ASICs into more peoples hands so it survivies'. our devs are pretty smart too, and there are also allot of big investors in bitcoin now as well. im not sure they would be so willing to let it slip away.