Quote from: thelibertycap on August 23, 2014, 11:40:09 AM

Quote from: AnonyMint on August 19, 2014, 04:44:21 PM

1. The most used contracts must be put on ASICs to get scaling, because Moore's Law is ending (unless POET rescues it), i.e. they will force more centralization of mining not less.

Intel is working on it for a long time it seems from this 2009 article http://optics.org/article/40732 and they can throw billions at it so I am not too worried about that. Apparently we still have years before we start hitting limits even with current old-school technologies.

What's more - sillicon photonics is here, its the first step in this direction and should drop the costs of photonics considerably and drive the innovation further http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2345610/intel-primes-market-for-silicon-photonics-to-lift-data-centre-interconnect-speeds

Industrial miners will seek the least expensive power, cooling and labor. ASIC fabrication plants have the ability to continue scaling in spite of impending lithography limits by advancing to 3-dimensional monolithic circuits. I expect that even small advances in hashing per watt will induce industrial miners to replaced their older rigs in less than a year, because of the relentless pace of difficulty increases in PoW coins.

As Tim Swanson well describes in his recent book, the marginal profit gained by miners when PoW coin prices increase is swiftly accommodated by an equal rise in the mining difficulty as competing miners add to their existing capacity.

I recall solo mining a couple of bitcoin blocks back in June 2010 after a popular tech blog brought Bitcoin coin to my attention. Within a few weeks, I shut down my quad core CPU miner as, on this forum, system administrators were bragging that they had installed bitcoind on hundreds, if not thousands, of computers at their workplaces. Difficulty soared back then, not because of any new mining tech, but rather because the capacity could be added and it was.