Quote from: zvs on June 26, 2012, 10:27:00 PM

Quote from: siggy on June 25, 2012, 06:33:28 PM

OK.. so I have kind of a different take on where difficulty post-asic will wind up....

I have no idea in hard numbers / actual terms... but in relative terms, it will wind up wherever it needs to be for the break-even running costs point to be around 10 cents per Kw/hr.. (this will of course vary based upon the USD/BTC exchange rate)

So.. if your electric costs more than 10 cents, don't even bother getting on the waiting list.. you'll never get your money back.

If you pay between 5 and 10 cents.. your break even (initial purchase + running costs) will be 1 to several years... Up to your individual confidince in bitcoin if you wanna play.....

If you pay less than 5 cents.. Time to beg/borrow/mortgage-the-farm and buy as many ASICs as you can. You will be in the select few who will still be able to mint money mining.

If you happen to live in the arctic circle, and heat with electric.. well then you might wanna consider robbing a few banks.... Just buy the company outright.

And one last thought... just like the gold rush, ultimately the ones who make the most money will be those that provide the picks & shovels (errr ASICs).. not the miners.

Sigg

like some others have said,

people will simply lose interest in bitcoins.

so a couple dozen people spend lots of $$ on ASICs, it's not worth mining for anyone else. now why do we care about bitcoins? so hobbyists can try to recoup their investments?

myself + a handful of friends became interested initially because we could generate a quarter of a bitcoin a day or w/e. we could have some actual involvement.

nobody i know spends bitcoins to buy drugs. i'm not particularly concerned with using USD on anything I buy.

it just won't matter anymore

If you already have GPU mining rigs, I assume you (and most people) will switch to Litecoin. In the past few days it's actually been a bit more profitable to mine LTC and sell for BTC then to mine BTC directly. And there are also a lot more Litecoins that can be mined. We just have to keep the interest of people like you a bit longer so that more services can be developed.