Quote from: philipma1957 on November 19, 2014, 03:10:27 AM

Quote from: micalith on November 16, 2014, 04:04:59 PM

http://www.cato.org/multimedia/daily-podcast/unfortunate-future-bitcoin

"bitcoin will crash to zero, get out now! Yes, I am disappointed too."

tl;dr "bitcoin will be worthless, because the mining will become centralised"

Quite a chilling speech by Kevin Dowd there. It's based on the assumption that mining will definitely end up becoming a centralised monopoly.

I'm fairly naive to the technical prospects of ASICs, but I was under the impression that ASICs development stands to reach a relative ceiling as it catches up with Moore's law, and that at this stage the advances in ASIC chip efficiency would slow down, matching Moores law as with other established processors. With the likes of Samsung then mass-producing mining chips for broad distribution, I would imagine that small-scale miners (especially solar powered ones) would become more accessible such that everyone could mine at the same rates. This would then re-decentralise the network again.

Am I wrong?

you are far more correct then Kevin Dowd as the mining is not very important at all in determining BTC's value.

ummm... last I checked, historically, there is a direct correlation between difficulty and price. Look at some graphs!