Hey Guys,
I know from trustworthy sources that Genesis mining (
www.genesis-mining.com) are selling in record numbers at the moment due to their extreme low prices and upgrade their farm more and more! If you read their posts and do some research they already had gigahashes of scrypt at the very beginning of this year when it was impressive to have > 10 MH/s with GPUs!
Could that be a threat to Altcoin world? What do you say?
ASICs are a good thing and a bad thing.
They are good because the higher the available hash rate for any coin the more resistant is the coin to attacks. Just two days ago NOBLE coin network had a 51% and transactions from mining pools stayed unconfirmed for days. Fortunately (and that speaks volumes about the robustness of crypto) no coin was lost and everything is back to normal.
NOBLE is a coin I trust and want to support. If I had more mining power (and ASICS can give me this power) I would step in to support the coin I believe in by adding more hash power to the network.
Unfortunately, ASICs are also bad because they can give that hash power needed to attackers also.
However, I believe most people are afraid of the ASICs not because of the power they give to attack an existing coin but the power they give for scammers to pump and dump any coin or just create a coin to pump and dump at the exchanges.
But this issue is not a threat to Altcoin world. The reason is, if altcoins are to expand and become a serious player in the larger economy (like I expect them to be) then the market itself would get to be mature enough to address pump and dump. After all, how many times could one be scammed with pump and dump with bleep coins that get created in May and are dead by June?
The point many people make against ASICs, that these kind of miners are not available to ordinary people, is pointless: do you know a lot of ordinary people that just happen to have an R9 X290 GPU lying around or installed by default in their "ordinary" PC?
Of course not. People are deliberately buying that kind of hardware because they want to do mining. But the same can be said for ASICs: instead of buying an R9 290X to get 750KHs at a cost of around $600 why not buy a couple of Gridseeds to get the same hash rate at half the cost? Doesn't lower cost help MORE ordinary people get in the game?
Designing crypto coins around algorithms that specifically try to make them "ASIC resistant" sounds to me like designing a Video Game resistant to the new 3D engine!!!
So, no, ASICs do have a negative side, but the Altcoin world is FAR FAR better with them.