Bitcoin Forum

Why exactly is the community supporting open source for ASICs, when only a chosen few are allowed hardware?

The point of open source software is that it can be run by anyone.  At this point, open source is providing incentive for ASIC mines to hoard their chips for internal use *cough butterfly cough*.

this is what open source is like..everything is 'opened', but only a few can actually get it working)

I would agree. It concerns me that ASICs are reserved for a wealthy elite.

It's only reserved for the wealthy elite if you're not willing to take on the risk yourself.  I know people who spend $30k on an SUV; if I wasn't  already too late for the party I'd take out a second mortgage to buy an avalon at the BTC cost.

I think the big benefit of ASICs is power reduction.  However, it requires hobbyists to buy new hardware.

I agree with the head start thing... it is inherently unfair.  That along with BTC's long-ish difficulty adjustment timeframe means many (or... few) can exploit it to get a lot of extra BTC.

I just don't get why anybody who has successfully built one would ever sell one as they can make far more from keeping it than they ever would from selling it.
By selling to others they would be making their own machines less profitable, as soon as you have one you would soon be able to afford more.

problem being: if you keep them all to yourself you'd soon take over more than half of bitcoins hashing power, thus killing bitcoin and your own operation with it. if you keep some for yourself and sell of the rest you can make a profit both mining AND selling the hardware, thus getting ahold of more bitcoins without overtaking the network.

Hmm maybe, not convinced though.

They must have determined that they will make more money in the long run by selling ASICs than by using them.

Possible.  However, I think the power savings from ASICs are a good thing for everyone in general.

I love GPU hashing though, and with all the altcoins recently it's still a viable way to go.  I imagine scrypt coins will still have high conversion rates to bitcoins and will be valuable, which means GPU miners will have a place.

I wish I had an ASIC.  They seem to be screaming fast.

But if that's the case then why aren't they marking the prices up 10x since the demand is so high? I too am concerned about these ASIC distributors' motives.

Why do real-life arms dealers sell their high-tech weapons, rather than keeping it themselves and invading a poor war-torn country?

The ASIC manufacturers know that as more and more ASICs start mining, the network difficulty will go exponentially upwards. GPU miners will become like CPU miners of old. Soon you will need a 10 Ghash/sec rate just to earn 0.1 BTC/day. So ... they see the future and the writing that is already on the wall. They will make more profit selling the weapons rather than having the headaches of trying to run a poor country for themselves.

Don't think using weapons to invade a country is the same as using electricity to mine coins. If they were to put all their miners to work today the manufactures would still have an upper hand for quite some time. But on the other hand it is less risky being the middle man.