Quote from: rockmoney on August 12, 2018, 04:20:15 AM

Quote from: FFI2013 on July 27, 2018, 10:30:05 AM

All these asics are going to crank up the difficulty until ETH mining is sitting at the bottom of the charts than everyone who spent money on these asics will cry well stop supporting asics manufactures

As many others have been saying throughout this thread - PoS (Proof of Stake) is coming!

I realize the Ethereum team is WAY behind schedule when it comes to implementing any type of PoS protocol, however, this is much more complicated than most people realize. Regardless, the PoS implementation will happen slowly over time, and PoW will not just be suddenly switched off one day. In Vitaliks Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget (FFG) project, PoS implementation would be slowly transitioned into Ethereum mining over time, while reducing PoW mining rewards until they ultimately reach zero.

To keep on topic, PoW Ethereum mining is not going away anytime soon in my opinion. I was lucky to have had the opportunity to purchase the first batch Antminer E3 for $800 USD some time ago, and although I don't care for the manufacturer, I have been happy with the product and results. Compared to my six 8GB NVIDIA GeForce 1070Ti GPU rigs, the Antminer E3 is currently the much less expensive and overall better choice to mine Ethereum (although the resale value will ultimately diminish, the ROI time is ~5-6 times less).

I am in favor of GPU/CPU mining vs ASIC mining, but the opportunity to purchase ~190 MH/s of stable Ethereum mining that uses ~800 Watts of power for $800 USD is a very sharp double edged sword! Although very limited and not at all versatile when compared to the mineable asset options of a GPU, these ASIC miners can mine other assets as well.

In summary, building a huge Ethereum ASIC mining farm is certainly not the best idea for most, purchasing a few of these miners might not be such a bad idea for some..

Yeah, I agree, POS will be the way of the future, BUT, we are in the present right now, not the future, so what I try to do is pick hybrid coins with both POW, and POS, that way as the difficulty gets higher and the electric costs begin to approach the proceeds from mining, the staking rewards come in and start to offset the diminishing mining rewards. Of course sometimes it's a better deal to mine some other non-POS coin and sell them to buy the one you really want, but as far as HODL coins, POS is the winner. (With some obvious exceptions) So far so good anyways.