Bitcoin Forum

Here are my assumptions to arrive at this conclusion:

• Alt coins are basically "dead," or at best, give a quick bonus for mining early, then quickly go down to 100% or less of BTC.
• Difficulty will continue to increase by at least 10% every two weeks for at least 7 months. We've been averaging 17% every two weeks, and we have not even seen the biggest ASIC surges yet.
• Bitcoin price may rise, but it may not. Assuming a miner cashes BTC immediately, later rises in BTC mean very little additional income. If you expect BTC to rise much later, just buy BTC now.
• Assume 2.5 "real-world" MH/J efficiency--that is about the best I've seen.
• Assume a base of $116/BTC
• Assume $0.11/KWh.

If these assumptions are correct (and I think they're essentially best-case), you can expect to make 3.4 BTC per GH of hashing power over the economic life of the card (which is about 237 days at the moment). To my knowledge, this means that there are ZERO economic GPUs out there right now.

Let's take a 7970 at 200 watts and 650 MH/s (which is a generous 3+ MH/J):
Total BTC earned after electricity: 2.53 ($293.77)
Time to 0 BTC/day: 280 days

In short, DO NOT buy a card just to mine.

You are not doing it right if you aren't making good on your investment with mining.

In my experience if you pay attention and assess which is the most profitable coin to be mining on a daily or weekly basis you will adapt to the shifts in popularity and keep yourself in the green. If you need any tips, feel free to PM me with your issues.

My 2 cents,

Steelburn@Coincepts

This is probably true at the same time, people without electricity costs it's still somewhat worth while even if you can resell the card or you genuinely want a new card, depends if you buy first hand kit for a GPU mining rig then your not to smart as second hand gives you a lot better chances.

ASIC is going to be weird as sure they're the next step but once they become obsolete it's going to be pretty useless, at least graphics and FPGA had some use afterwards and therefore resell value.

Wait. I'm confused. You are saying you will earn $293 on the card but you won't get your money back? When you are done with the GPU resell it. I imagine in a year 7950s will fetch $150 so your $275 investment returned $443 when shutting down the operation.

Unlike ASICs, there is an aftermarket for GPUs.

You're basically arguing with my first assumption. While I agree that alt coins can be profitable early on (and I have made some quick bucks on FTC and CNC), I believe this to be a fad, with less interest in each new alt coin. Also, as more and more miners get clued in on this strategy, the difficulty rises so quickly that alt coins quickly decrease to 100% of BTC profitability. As I said, there are quick bursts of profit to be made with new alt coins, but things quickly revert to the mean. Even LTC has effectively been less profitable than BTC for awhile now, given additional power consumption and NMC bonus.

Currently, there is no alt coin consistently more profitable than BTC.

I'm still able to pay for 2x cards a month but 6 of 8 of the cards will be off free electricity.  Then when the cards are no use most likely still worth 60% of the cost on ebay.  I don't see the issue.  If your plan selling the cards back at the end your going to make the $$ faster.  Also usually the price of BTC goes up with difficulty. 

Just don't tell the buyer you mined with it for a year ;-)

Also, as every GPU out there will be uneconomical in a year, there will be a glut of used cards, and I think $150 is optimistic, given 8xxx cards coming out, etc. Also, my example was for a 7970, not 7950, which is a bit less powerful (e.g 500 MH @ 200 W).

But point taken re: resale value. However, if we even see 15% hash rate growth vs. 10% in my example, that 500/200 card returns a mere $137 over its life, barely over 1 BTC. With resale of $150, you're basically at break-even. You have to be pretty certain that hash rate growth stays under 15% at this point.

My point is that it's a very bad time to be thinking about a GPU farm, and even small underestimations in hash rate increases result in disastrous ROI.

Obviously free electricity changes the economics entirely, and is:

1. in violation of my assumptions (let's try to stay within them or argue that they are unrealistic)
2. extremely unusual--most of us pay for electricity.


I totally disagree with this. Difficulty (up until now) has changed as a result of price changes. Miners respond to incentive.

I say "up until now" because ASIC miners are basically profitable at any price, and so there will be very little relation between price and difficulty for some time. Price will fluctuate, difficulty will rise.

I am not 100% convinced there won't be a market for ASICs after the difficulty makes mining BTC unprofitable.  I saw a guy on reddit that said he is going to try and use the Erupter USBs to develop an ASIC for Litecoin.  If it can be done on the USB version, I am sure someone will do so for the larger ASICs as well.  Alt coins are a big question mark, but if there is still interest down the line, there will be a resale potential in that market.  Litecoins were supposed to be GPU-proof.  They weren't.  So they are most certainly not ASIC-proof either.

I am not sure what the ASIC market would be--current ASICs are SHA-256 and are good for absolutely nothing else other than SHA-256 mining. It's in the hardware.

There is nothing preventing scrypt ASICs of course, except the large initial investment, but again, they would be useless for anything other than scrypt mining.

I have not read much about Scrypt but my understanding is that the algorithm used is so memory intensive that there may not be the performance gain that we saw going from GPU/FPGA to ASIC with BTC. It sounds like you'd basically be building a compute core with access to massive amounts of bandwidth, also known as a GPGPU.

I do agree that for BTC mining that now is not the time to buy a GPU. Because there are more efficient means to mining BTC, I think we'll see the difficulty increase but the price won't fluctuate much due to miner pressure. Or rather, I suppose I should say that more hashing capacity will come online as the price stays stable.

However, I do believe there is room for more than one crypto-currency and I believe LTC has sufficient presence to survive and thrive. I do think though that LTC is undervalued slightly right now and we'll see LTC profitability compared to BTC at 'equal'(1000:1 hash ratio) hash rates increase slightly.

If I had a dollar for every time I have been told this same thing...

I 100% agree with the original poster.

But people seem to want to buy GPUs anyways, so good luck.


I think there is kind of a gold rush mentality presently.

Like the people who are spending $30k+ on pre-order Avalon ASICs. Or block eruptor USBs.

They will never make their money back. Yet they still buy.

Heard it all b4.... lol

Hey, it's your money. We'll see in a month or so who is right. Just don't say we didn't warn you.

Arguing that GPU mining is dead is also arguing that scrypt mining is dead since GPUs are the best available option for mining scrypt coins, and I happen to disagree with that sentiment. LTC happens to be doing very well at the moment and is valued at over $3 per coin, so we'll see who's right if and when LTC hits Mt Gox...

Various folks have been making similar statements about GPU mining going all the way back to 2011, and while they may eventually be correct if you wait long enough, timing is everything and everyone up until this point has had the timing wrong. I believe the first few months of 2013 were some of the most profitable ever for GPU miners, and my electricity costs are pretty low (~$0.065/KWh).

ATI will also release their 8000 series of video cards later this year which should be more powerful and use less power, which will change the GPU mining equation yet again.

ASIC supply is currently very limited, and they are going for exorbitant prices (~5BTC per GHs). I refuse to pay that price and will happily stick to GPU mining until the price of ASICs comes down to a reasonable level.

If the price of LTC and/or BTC goes up, I may even purchase more GPUs if the ROI looks reasonable at that time. Right now, the ROI for GPUs honestly isn't that much worse than the estimated ROI of an ASIC device selling that ~5BTC per GHs if one has low electricity costs! I can build a 2.5 GHs GPU mining rig for ~$1600, and if BTC or LTC is worth zero tomorrow because of a cryptocoin hack, I can always sell the GPUs on Ebay.

I believe some miners purposely give out bad advice on forums like this one to discourage new folks from mining because it will chip away at their own personal profits. How many GPUs do you own, FloridaBear?  ;)

Even if you add 400TH/s to the network right now and keep the price like right now, these people WILL make their money back. Unless you decide to enter a huge number of 500GH/s miners, they will.

Do the damn calculations, guys.

Put 50 million, which is adding 4 times the whole network strength, put the timeframe in and see what happens.

last year, bitcoins were at around $5-$8 most of the summer.  even with current difficulties, the profit margin is higher right now than it was then.  so scrypt does alright, as the bots do their thing.   did litecoin drop in value about 10-15% since last difficulty change a day or so ago?   nobody wants litecoin, except to exchange it for bitcoins or some other currency

anyway, i said buying a GPU farm was dumb in early feb, when those first avalon asics shipped.. i was wrong.   if you bought w/ any clue as to what you were doing, you'll have a very good profit.  esp if you find the right time to sell those 5830's, 5870's, and 5970's that were selling used back then for about 50% of the value they do now

i also said it was foolish to pre-order this BFL crap last year, when bitcoins were at $7 or $8 and that you'd be better off just buying the currency itself (you wouldn't be pre-ordering if you didn't think the price was going up)

Yes, but mining LTC vs. mining BTC is currently a wash. There is no advantage to LTC mining. I believe it will stay that way--as soon as LTC becomes attractive, GPUs get moved over from BTC mining, and the advantage disappears. This will happen until ALL GPUs are mining LTC...at which point there may be some time where LTC has an advantage, as the hash rate will likely stop increasing, or greatly slow down. This is months down the road, and does not violate my premise that one should not buy NOW to mine. There are already scrypt FPGA designs in the works which may change this equation (for the worse) at some point as well--it's too soon to tell.

In addition, the LTC/BTC price has been quite stable and I don't see much reason for that to change (however I agree that Gox may give it a short boost).


All true. However, that doesn't mean I'm not right this time ;-)


Right. But that does not conflict with my premise that one should not buy NOW.


Of course, if you got 'em, smoke 'em...and I agree that ASIC pricing (especially ASICMINER) is exorbitant.


Like a car, GPUs lose value the minute you crack the box open--at this point, breaking even is questionable over any time frame. I'm just trying to sound the alarm that GPU mining is essentially over. I don't believe this is bad advice--after looking at the recent rate of increase of hashrate, I'm being conservative. And a few more GPUs doesn't do much to the network has rate when ASICMINER is measuring its increases in TH and overall network %.

I have exactly one GPU mining (a 7970). I have made back nearly 100% of the cost over the last 6 weeks or so. Going forward, I will only see another 2.5 BTC or so out of it ever.

I think the biggest thing to remember here is that right now Litecoin is dying out, just like all the other altcoins. I suppose if everyone GPU mining Bitcoin moves over to Litecoin it might pick up, or die entirely. I don't think anyone has an idea at this point. Litecoin values are so tied to Bitcoin that it's difficult to think of it as an actual currency. This whole thing is completely unknown at this point, even the financial "experts" are stumped. But your main point is valid, buying GPUs now with the idea that you can switch to Litecoin afterwards is not a safe plan.

So, newbies, don't buy a bunch of Radeons right now. ASICs will be readily available to all very soon. Avalon, ASICminer and BFL apparently all have products available or close to available. Of course those ASICs are priced crazily high, I expect that eventually prices will come down.

LOL at OP.  I guess we are now assuming that these video cards are going to be worth $0 in 3 months?  And the 2-4 games they come with CERTAINLY can't be sold for ~$20 each.  /rolleyes.

Obviously if BTC were to rise by a factor of 10 or 20 as it did over the last year, that changes the math completely, but it only prolongs the inevitable. For example, let's take our 500/200 card (7950), and assume that BTC increases a healthy 0.5% per day, making it $716 in a year. In that scenario, the card will stay viable until ~1.5 years from now when 1 BTC is $1639, and yet its total earnings will still only be $433. You're way better off just buying BTC. And this is in a scenario where BTC hits $1,000,000 in 5 years (let me just say that I'm ok with that LOL). In a more reasonable 0.15% per day BTC gain (e.g. BTC is $200 in a year), that card earns $203 total, and is only viable for about 8 months.

On the flip side, if BTC declines by 0.15% per day, our card earns $139 in 167 days and has to be resold when BTC drops to $90.

I'm assuming a 12% bi-weekly hash rate gain in these examples

I acknowledged early on in this thread (I know, TL;DR) that they have resale value. I would argue that you still may not make a profit. You keep laughing and buying them GPUs, but don't say I didn't warn you. Do you seriously expect the hash rate to flatten out going forward after averaging a 17% increase every two weeks over the last 3 months?  ::)

I agree it's not really profitable like the calculators I've found online point out that it will be. To me its more of a hobby plus I love gaming with 4 cards! Instead of selling my cards I plan to take the profits and put it towards 3 to 5 27-32" LCD's setup vertically for gaming.

 For those expecting to sell the cards for 60% profit, if you do so soon you might but once the new generation of cards releases the value will fall like GPU's have historically....like a ROCK. lol.

 
 Good luck guys, this surely isn't for everyone.

Come back in six months, you should see something interesting happen to LTC price.

I already made about 3500% mining Litecoins from 2011 onwards, so I won't worry.  There's still time to be an early adopter on the Litecoin network before BTC is made totally unmineable by the presence of ASICs, though.

You are forgetting a few major components...

1: Alt coins = FAD = SO was/is bitcoins. That point is moot. If it is "cheap" to produce bitcoins, the price will drop. Since it is harder (more overhead) to produce alt-coins, that alone is what gave coins the actual value, and will give them value when we all go there and start using them. You have to remember, there are millions of US and only a few hundred or thousand with large quantities of ASIC's that will be still in the game here. Thus, they can have all the coins. They can trade them with themselves. We will go where the actual gains are. We are the majority they stole it from. We will just up and leave.

2: You are forgetting "transaction fees", which are increasing, and will eventually be larger than any "rewards". As long as the pool-operators are not squandering them, and just feeding us "treasure-hunt coins". (That is where solo mining pays-off, and rewards for coins are just a bonus.)

3: If the hardware lasts only a few months, it has been paid off. Provided the coin value does not fall, and you didn't cash-out... or provided you did cash out now, while the value is still on the high end.

4: OMG THE SKY IS FALLING... Didn't they say all this when GPU mining became "new"... OMG the value will plummet! OMG you are going to loose everything! OMG Its going to crash! Um... No, we just buy ASIC's instead of GPU's and we retire the GPU's, or move them to a profitable alt-coin. The sky is not falling.

lol.. or... we just "change the code" to add security that asic's can't handle. It wouldn't break anything behind the scenes, but it would surely keep all the people holding coins from loosing value to the ASIC corporate-manufactures... Who will NOT be us.

Plus the 7990's will be $800 soon, and consume less power, again. For those still doing the GPU thing.

Bitcoins are the new "Linden", the new "paypal", the new "myspace", the new "facebook". People won't put-up with all the massive synchronization and oversized wallets and account theft, unless someone with real structure manages all this correctly. (With less loss, and cutting out all the childish bickering.)

No idea what you are trying to say here.


Fees are currently ~4% of rewards. I did not include them at this time. However, since BTC block rewards will not halve for nearly 4 years, I expect fees to stay at 4%. On the flipside, I also neglect pool fees (and some pools do not even distribute fees to miners).


Please read the OP. It is NOT paid off in a few months--that's the whole point of this thread.


Umm, ok, I'm not trying to say bitcoins are going to 0 or the value will plummet, etc. All I am trying to say is that it is unwise to buy GPUs at this time to mine.


Will never happen. Way too much invested in ASICs now to change the BTC hash algorithm. That's what alt-coins are for.


Yes on the $800, no on consume less power. Same MH/J as 7970 (as it's basically same GPU)


Relevence?

That statement makes no sense at all.  The Avalon ASIC is a chip designed to hash SHA-256 and only SHA-256.  It's not going to hash scrypt.

OP is absolutely right, you should get rid of your GPU's today.

Send me a PM and I'll give you an address to a place that recycles them for free. They'll even pay for the shipping of your old card so you don't have to worry about any costs what-so-ever of getting rid of your excess GPU's.

Gosh this forums is now filled with bunch of retards. It must be due to all the rick quick scheme that media hyped up over the past couple months i bet.

I'm talking about the guy that you quoted.....

Next: I read on reddit that by stretching my dick every night my dick will be huge and i'll become a chick magnet.

Well, I needed new graphics cards anyway for gaming.  ;D

I really don't care if the 3x7950's pay for themselves or not. It will be a killer crossfire rig anyway.  :-*

So, if I mine some coins with them, that just means that I will be offsetting their price a little bit.

Amortize that over a period of a year, and it's not so bad.

They are called General Purpose Graphics Processing Units for a reason, to do more than one thing.

According to my simple calculations plugged into any bitcoin calculator, graphics cards will probably be good enough until the difficulty hits about 25 million, probably in about 5-6 months.

That's a lot of assumptions, without any actual knowledge or proof, other then speculation on hypothetical possibilities.

Thus, useless. That was the point of my prior post.

Who are you warning? Yourself? Why do you care what others do? Obviously your point of view is as limited as your knowledge, but I may just be assuming that. (Irony)

So, should we all buy "non-existent, non-shipping", ASIC's that won't be here until after Christmas?

How will a purchase NOT pay itself off? It would only take four to five months, even with some slopes. Switching to any alt-coin covers any losses here. Reselling hardware that is only 3-months old, previously new, used little, is not hard to do. Used, these cards still sell for $380-$480 each.

What, the 7990's are just a 7970! Where the hell did you learn to read?
1x 7970 = 600-750MHs @ 220-260w
1x 7990 = 1200-1400MHs @ 300-400w

Here is a math problem for you...
1 bitcoin today
+1 bitcoin tomorrow
+1 bitcoin the next day =
more than 0 bitcoins for the next five months, which is the projected arrival date of most "only 2 more months" ASIC's.

It will take them MONTHS to amass any destructive value. More than half the coins are already "valued", and only 1/4 of the remaining coins will be MINED in the next four years. Even if they released 100THs of machines, it still wouldn't be more than 50% of the GPU's power running now.

http://bitcoin.sipa.be/

That Peak, is about to turn into a plateau. It was just a rise for the "next gen", which is not only ASIC's, but GPU builders building ROOMS of computers, not just a single computer in a bedroom.

Income is only 4% from transactions... Who the hell told you that shit? Obviously you are being played by your Pool! Try solo mining. It wasn't profitable with CPU's or a year ago, with GPU's, but OBVIOUSLY... the growing number of solo miners is nearing a large volume for a reason. (The harder the difficulty, the more transactions are in a block, and the greater the fee-rewards are. Look at the block chart data.)

The "defense" was that alt-coins were a FAD...Yea, they WERE, so were bitcoins. Bitcoins didn't make bitcoins valuable, we did, and where we go, the value goes. With our hardware.

But anyways... Don't buy GPU's. That leaves more hashing for me, here or there... On a plane, on a train, in Spain, or in the rain. I don't give a flying f**k, as long as it turns green, and comes from my f**king machine!

My turn around time for profit, not including selling the free games that come with the cards, and not including the resale of the cards themselves for 80% of their value, AND not including Bitcoin going up in price, is 2.5 months. How can I possibly NOT profit?

Thanks for the warning, now leave... since you have no interest in bitcoins, or alt-coins. Obviously a fanboy for the hype of ASIC's, which are just flying off the shelves faster than they can be invented! lol.

FloridaBear has clearly made way too many assumptions to have any credibility...this is just more button pushing to try and curb the flood of new miners coming to the market.

Lets address the fallacy of his assumptions:

The assumption that Bitcoin will not go up is fundamentally and historically broken.  Infrastructure is getting better, the first convention/limited government is poised to add stability, and the its nowhere near public adoption yet, media coverage is expanding, and most importantly the capital expenditure in equipment and electricity supporting the network is growing exponentially.

He can't possibly be here trying to sell the idea that cryptos are going away, right?  Everything points to the opposite the same as Google, Facebook, apple, etc. etc.  So if Bitcoin is staying then we can easily (and more accurately) make the assumption the other way, that Bitcoin values will increase, and probably exponentially (as it catches on), and then linearly (linear growth will only be the norm when the global market is affected significantly by Bitcoin).   We can reliably look at the last 20 years of significant innovations growth models to arrive at this conclusion.

Granted you're analysis seems to have overlooked all of these core points.  Nonetheless, let me address a few of your other "assumptions".

"Altcoins are a fad" - certainly you'd have a case for unoriginal copies of Bitcoin being "doomed" in the long term

However, to ignore innovations like Litecoin, PPcoin, and other fundamentally different alt coins is ignoring the fundamental nature of new innovations (sometimes the first one to market doesn't always have the best product or the product that will dominate the marketplace).  It also ignores the fact that Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. etc...do not control 100% of their respective markets just because they were the first/biggest/etc.   Please at least demonstrate some basic market / economics knowledge before spreading the doom and gloom.  You're assumption's basis is purely opinion and lacks support.

"Altcoin profitability is a wash at best "-

 I think I read that you have a 7970 and if you do it suits you because its the one card that doesn't appreciably outperform its Bitcoin hash #'s when turned to scrypt mining.  However, even your 7970 does better (if we move the standard order of magnitude down mhash to khash) at mining scrypt than straight SHA 256.... GPU's are particularly good at scrypt in fact because of their high frequency memory and now increased mem capacities (thanks to graphics demands in larger screens/resolutions).   Most cards achieve up to 20% more khash on scrypt than on Bitcoin mining (Ex. a 7950 will usually do around 550-580 Mhash at stable temps and reasonable overclocking,  a properly setup 7950 on scrypt will be in the 670's on khash).  Given the conversion rate currently in place most educated scrypt miners are producing 15-30% more equivalent value on Litecoin today with the same hardware.

You've also failed to acknowledge that roughly 30THash worth of GPU's are or were running on the Bitcoin network and have been making their way over to Litecoin.   Guess what happens when all those resources and energy expenditures fortify Litecoin....the value goes up (Just like Bitcoin).

Every single one of your arguments really only holds water if:  All crypto currencies fail....and sorry to say but that's tin foil hat territory now.  Will there be economic shifts, government intervention, market crashes, etc?... Absolutely.   However, this genie isn't going back in the bottle and trying to scare off investments in mining serves zero purpose.  

Every mining rig in operation strengthens the integrity and the valuation of the cryptos.

Market cap for Bitcoin or the leading crypto will most likely reach 1 trillion in the next few decades....if that's the case even your 7970 will have been worth its weight in gold....but by all means go back to surfing porn if that's you're preferred use for your valuable GPU time.

10% over 7 months is an exaggeration.
The supposed death of alts and their non-profitability too.

There might be a brief period where mining will be unprofitable but that would be due to declining prices of BTC.

did you know that a vga, can let you... dunno how to say.... PLAY GMAES, other than mining?
so if i have a crossfire of 7970 and i'm mining, right now, when the thing become not profitable, i just play games with them, they always keep their value

How about just using 100% true statements - this would be better

You will never get your money back if your not making profit :)

If your still making profit keep at it stop when your not simple as that.  BTW I've got 75% of the equipment at work that is why its free I'm only limited to not blowing the breaker lol with other people having other devices connected.

I have bought an awesome Graphics card for mining. And the only reason I did was that I guessed, if I can have an awesome GPU that pays a lot of itself off and then I can play with it.

This forum has gone to the dogs....:(

I understand the buzz that ppl get when it first bites .........crypto fever ...but and heres the but

It would be nice that all the kids and noobs would at least listen to their peers instead of giving us lectures on how it is.....or how we just dont understand

The original OP is talking about his fear (IMHO) and the diff curve...and how he wants to buy GPU's from the greed gland but his logic and saftey is saying look at the last 5 mins and telling him not to...

This game is about long term and being there when the oppurtunitys arise.... and they do

Like tacotime I bought some ltc from some refunded shipping costs from a failed purchase...this shipping i sold out for $2500 which was a 8000% profit ...so as i was saying yeah......... short term winter IS comming......... but so is christmas and global warming ....the key point being that what goes up must come down or when its that low the only way is up

So OP ...dont buy GPU's and leave this hard game for the adults because crypto..... is not easy ....mining is not easy....keeping 10 rigs stable is not easy ...getting  a template rig working is not easy....getting supply of teh same components for your template is not easy....building and securing your transactions is not easy ...write code to support the community is not easy ... and finanly listening to noobs tell u how it is ...its not easy ...:D

LTC buyback time is coming right now. Winter is coming, let's buy firewood.

Do not buy GPUs so I can make a bigger profit  ;)
Thats a serious advise to all of you.

You have no clue what I'm interested in, so don't pretend to know. And I think I'll stick around for awhile...thanks for the warm welcome though.

You sound angry.  Why are you so angry? 

This is the post I was talking about.  If you disagree, you could just say that.  No need to put other people down to inflate your own ego. 

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1dogrx/announcement_block_erupter_usb_300mhs_asic_miner/c9sc0wx

When discussing the future, you have to make some assumptions. I think mine are conservative (e.g. likely). If you have specific issues, let's discuss them.


Never said anything like that.


So a 7990 gives about 3 MH/J, so maybe a tad better than a 7970. Not exactly revolutionary efficiency.


I bow to your superior math skillz.


Nope, we have not yet even seen the ASIC build-out. If anything, the slope will increase instead of flatten out.


Here: http://t.co/MyMiZln8HE (http://t.co/MyMiZln8HE) Scroll down. Four percent. And I have no idea what you are talking about when you say "The harder the difficulty, the more transactions are in a block," Where is your source for that?


The hardware goes where the profit is. Prices of the coins don't have anything to do with mining--it's supply and demand.


Yup, not buying GPUs will really slow that growth down. ASICMINER has rolled out 14 TH of new hashing in the last 2 weeks. That's the equivalent of 28,000 7950s coming online. In two weeks.

Under-exaggeration maybe. We've been averaging 17%; next retarget is at about +19% right now. If you have evidence that we will suddenly slow to under 10%, I'd like to see it. How many tens of thousands of Avalon chips have sold already?

Look at the way alt-coin profitability gets beat down so fast now--miners are clued in now. The days of alt-coins persistently outperforming BTC are over, IMO.

Even if BTC does increase exponentially, I seriously doubt it can keep up with difficulty. Hence, by your own argument, you should not buy GPUs; just buy BTC instead.


Yes, and using at least 10% more power. Personally, I have trouble maintaining even 600KH on my card due to temps; I can't be the only one. In any case, you're talking about a roughly 10% improvement in hash vs. Bitcoin--that to me is a "wash" considering 8% bonus for NMC and 4% bonus for fees. LTC is currently at 101% profitability vs. LTC. It's a wash.


I disagree. Price of any coin is primarily determined by supply/demand. Miners are secondary--they will move to where the profit is.


What? That makes no sense at all. I'm saying that the rampant success of bitcoin has made GPUs obsolete, that's all.


Yes, but with the exception of those with free power, there will be no GPUs mining BTC in a year. Only ASICs.

7 Months isn't all that sudden. People will stop buying ASICs in large amount once the electricity costs become significant again.

Yeah it's getting kind of pointless. My 7950 is earning me barely anything anymore.

Right now it is a wash to mine LTC instead of BTC, but historically, LTC has been ~30% more profitable to mine than BTC. I don't have a crystal ball to see if this trend will continue or not, but LTC has treated me very well in the past.

The main problem with your argument it the fact that it relies on so many assumptions. If anyone of your many assumptions are wrong, your entire conclusion is wrong.

1.) The price of BTC/LTC could go up or down. Assuming a fixed price is guaranteed to be wrong. I doubt many folks would have thought that the price of BTC would have increased by 10x in the past year, but it did, and kept GPU miners in the game. The price of LTC also increased dramatically over the past year, which was great for GPU miners.

2.) BTC happens to have the largest market cap at the moment because it was the first coin to implement a great idea and is the most well known. LTC, or some other alt coin could surpass BTC in the future. Suppose a large retailer, like Amazon.com, decided to support LTC before BTC because of faster transaction times. What do you think would happen to the value of BTC/LTC then? I am almost positive that adding LTC to Mt. Gox will increase the value and awareness of LTC, which should push the price up. Also, some other alt coin that doesn't even exist yet could come out and surpass both BTC and LTC. The future is unclear, crytocoins are in their infancy, and mining is a risky business.

My crystal ball is foggy, and the future is unknown, so I'll continue mine as many coins as possible (and diversify between coins) until it becomes unprofitable to do so. GPU miners can easily switch between coins to mine whatever is the most profitable at a given time. Also, I like mining because it provides a nice hedge against a price collapse and is a good way to continually acquire coins gradually over time. If I buy BTC directly, and the value crashes, I'm pretty much out of luck. Hardware can be resold following a crash to minimize a loss.

I'm doing alright so far... Only been doing it about 3 weeks and just last night added enough to get me to 1.5 Gh/s.  New cards bought on sale with rebates and selling game cards brings the cost way down.  Installing them in a handful of systems I had laying around- I've brought in about $140 for $700 in expense so far.

I'm having fun, and it looks like I'm going to do alright- no it won't make me rich, but especially when it comes time to sell cards I think I'll come out ahead by a fair bit.

PS- I did pre-order a BFL Jalapeno a 6 weeks ago.

Well just news coverage alone is great I swear during the "bitcoin boom" the BBC here in the UK did an article per week which helped drive value up, Bitcoin is very volatile so can swing either way quickly, I think the lack of easy to get ASIC Miners ( price and availability being a difficult balance) will drive up prices again pretty soon as more dependancies run on the currency.

Some strong opinions on this topic. Stay cool - ultimately this is just a math problem with lots of variables. The next step is to estimate the probabilities of changes in each variable, then write a grand formula...

OK people has anyone considered how much money the VIDEO CARD INDUSTRY is putting into buying cryptocoins? 
I know that if 20% of my sales of high end OpenCL cards were to miners, I'd spend 20+% of my profits ensuring that their value didn't crash...

I'd like to see breakdown stats of video card utilization: gaming, cryptocoin, decryption, etc... anyone?

Interesting to think about AMD investing in crypto. Good point. :)

I think the OP just doesn't mine like the % of us who are ear to the ground, ready to pack up and move to the next big thing before its big, etc. Mining is about risk. We are all prospectors afterall are we not?

OP might be FUDing, but he seems somewhat earnest, also he cites an interesting report on pool mining yields.

Given how huge they are, I don't think AMD is giving that much thought to cryptocoins, but from a strictly business
perspective it would make sense to subsidize the sector. Of course, they just make the chipsets, and then a manufacturer
builds the actual cards. If these manufacturers are smart, they'll do stuff like incentivize bulk purchases, include better stock
cooling solutions, etc.

Look at all the fortune tellers battling it out. IF you asked someone a few years ago if Bitcoin will go to $250 almost everyone would have said NO. LOL Just keep mining fellas and stop arguing.

QFE +1

When btc price per block was 50BTC, remember ? Last days to 25BTC per block and everyone was in panic that mining will be unprofitable. My biggest mistake was that i don't buy cards then.. 
Just keep mining.

If you use your gpu's for gaming and make a bit of coin on the side then its ok. But buying them just for mining is kind of pointless at the moment!

http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/   my two cents

Yep, I remember. I even shutdown the rigs and refused an occasion I had to buy cheap two 7970. Arghhh...
There were similar threads back then, backed up with figures and assumptions, GPU mining is dead !

Well, it will be...probably...eventually...and most likely buying a bunch of 10 cards right now is not the smartest move.
But hey, I just bought another 7970 :)

The OP is completely right. Buying GPUs is far too risky now for the vast majority of miners hoping to break even, let alone profit.

Bitcoin isn't at $250 right now. It's not even half that. It wasn't even at 250 for a couple of hours.

Don't mine because you expect bitcoins to go up. Just buy bitcoins instead.

Lets say I buy a 7970 for 400$ now.

It mines at 700mh/s. We have a price of 110 and in one year, Bitcoin goes to 200.  Profitability declines by 60% or more.
You have 727 dollars when investing, ~ 1500 after one year of mining and not selling bitcoins.

All economy is risk, if money was a sure thing we'd all be raking it in, OP makes assumptions and the ASIC market isn't really proven, there's so many uncertainties as the like of BFL haven't got many of their units out so far and people are still gambling on them being stable units, part of me things when it comes to BFL they are serious issues in the stability due to overheating of their products hence the case changes for the smaller models let alone their higher end products.

TL/DR but ^this. Also cards have resale value and game codes....

Of course; it's just that the rewards aren't worth the risk anymore for GPUs.

Come on guys, this is the same old story over and over, don't do this, don't do that...for how many threads now since last year?

Take the risk, don't take the risk, whatever.

Better wait until GPU mining IS dead and open a I've told you so thread.

How do you figure this?

I'm putting in 50 million for the difficulty, and assuming a GPU that does 750MH/s and costs $300. I put 250W power consumption and the default of 0.15 cents/KWh. I used $115 for the btc rate. Let's see that device will break even... NEVER according to the calculator. You lose money just running it.
Even if your electricity is free, it will still take a year to pay for itself, and in a year the difficulty will be more like 500 million, not 50 million.

Your problem is your profitability is going to decline by waaaay more that 60%. More like 98% or so.
You need to take into account:
- The 600 65GH/s Avalon machines that will be shipping in batch 2 any day now
- The 600 65GH/s machines from Avalon batch 3.
- The 200 TH/s that ASICMiner says they will add in the next 2-3 months
- The 60,000 plus Butterfly Labs pre-orders, which should add another 200-300 TH.
- The hundreds of thousands of Avalon discrete 282 MH/s chips that are being sold.

Difficulty will easily be in the hundreds of millions in the next 6 months.

Because when GPU mining becomes unproftable, everyone will dump their used GPUs and you are not going to get 80% of what you paid for them.

Second, you don't have 2.5 months. Difficulty will double in the next month or so. Even if you take a very conservative approach and figure it only continues to go up 15% every 2 weeks as it has been, you still won't realize a ROI in anywhere near 2.5 months.

The only chance you can break even is if you sell your GPU now, buy bitcoins instead, and pray for them to go up in value.

With 1200 65GH/s Avalon machines on their way, not including ASICMiner and BFL machines, you are going to be in trouble.

Yes....I will. I have been building and selling gaming and office computers for about 6 years now. I will EASILY make 100% of my money back on each and every GPU.  And my electricity is 6.7 cents/KWh. My GPU miners are VERY pofitable...thanks.

Yes but you've never had to deal with thousands of others all selling the same GPU on ebay before.

If you already have the GPUs, well then by all means, keep on mining. You should be able to cover the cost of your electricity for some more time and you'll get free heat in the winter. If you don't already own the GPUs though, don't buy them, you'll never recover their cost.

Avalon batch 2 started shipping today if you haven't heard.

I don't sell on ebay, I sell locally.  I honestly can't see that many people being into mining in my city, LOL. Especially since I ask most of my friends and they've never even heard of it.

7970's would be one of the worst cards to buy purely for mining as well... if you're going to game with it also, sure.

Otherwise you're purchasing a card that's going to decline in value (absolute $) more than any other card out there over the next few months

Thanks for the discussion, everyone. This has been an interesting thread. While we're talking about profitability, I will use this soapbox to try to dissuade people from buying the ASICMINER USB miners. If you think you are going to make a profit with those, I believe you are sadly mistaken. I think they will make about 1 BTC over their useful life. Granted, there may be other reasons to buy them (they're cute). ASICMINER blades are also questionable due to their high prices, but at least you can get them NOW while difficulty is still relatively low. Those have a much better chance of breaking even than the USB devices.

Disclaimer: I own ASICMINER shares LOL

Are you jusy saying that because of the 8*** series cards coming out or?

LMAO! Agreed! Those devices are 2BTC each, and will NEVER break even. There are a few group buys that have been put together to order 100 at a time, and it's all novelty buyers, or complete idiots who cannot do math.

Luckily, most of the imbeciles and novelty buyers trying to organize group buys on these things are about 200 units shy of a 300 unit minimum order. Good luck with that, ASICMINER.  ::)

You think GPUs are a bad investment? The ASIC USB sticks are 1000 times worse. Not only will they never break even, they also have ZERO resale value/utility outside of Bitcoin mining. The only way they're gonna sell many unless they drop the price to .25BTC or less.

I misread the stat. In the article, it says "Fees are up to 4%..." Looking at the actual numbers, fees are closer to 1% on average.

currently they are priced 2btc plus shipping, this is even worse

ROI on GPU is about 2-8 months for the last 3 years and it'll stay that way, it's not only the ghashes that counts in this game, but also a number of peers as a relevant factor... asics will never be as cheap as gpu and therefore percentage wise number of peers criteria will always be on gpu side... I agree that the buzz about subcoins is just buzz, it's best to mine bitcoin, not subcoins...

what? It's all about the ghashes. What do you mean by "peers"? That has nothing to do with mining profitability. ASICs are already cheaper than GPUs when you look at from ghash/$. And it doesn't matter about the price anyways. Enough ASICs have already been sold to make GPU mining dead forever. Even if BFL never ships, the ASICs from ASICMiner and Avalon have already killed GPU mining. It's too late to upgrade to ASICs if you haven't already. Just sit back and watch the difficulty rise. You have maybe 2 months left of profitable GPU mining tops. Maybe only 1.

Technically, they're 1.9BTC, but I just rounded up to 2BTC, figuring in shipping. Shipping is probably actually more than that, so you're probably right.

Peer is an entity which participates in mining. Number of peers is a criteria that plays a role in support price level analysis. I thought as well that the ASIC will render GPU obsolete, but it didn't. Diff went up 5X during last couple of months.

It's almost paradoxical, number of peers rise, yet supply drops.

I think I side with the pessimists on this one.

I only started mining in March (besides a brief stint in 2010). Seeing the LTC difficulty go from about 60 to about 600 in less than 2 months was a depressing surprise. I knew difficulty went up quickly, but I didn't really get just how fast it went up until seeing it myself.

I don't think that BFL will ship in bulk, or over 5% of their orders. I think they'll run out of, or away with, the money (just my opinion.) But even with BFL out of the picture GPU mining is just about done.

There'll be more ASIC companies coming out. I think some of ya'll are in denial that we are at the start of the ASIC wave in earnest. As no one mines on CPUs hardly, no one will be mining in GPUs by the end of this year, I don't think...

Anyways I'm currently planning to sell my 5 video cards around mid-June, and put that money towards other Bitcoin  investments. I'm in Avalon batch 3 and plan to get into the next generation of ASICs whenever they become available.

Buying any new GPUs from this point forward, for mining, is not a good way to spend money IMHO.

newer technology always declines in value faster

if the next series comes out, then the effect would be even more pronounced

right now you can buy a 7850 or 7870 and if you do the rebate and sell the games, then you could already sell the card used and make a profit on it (actually, i suppose the card would still be "new")

At 600 though, today's LTC value has them at about 96% of a Bitcoin.  The difficulty spike has followed the massive spike in value.  There's no way miners wouldn't shift for the sake of arbitrage.


While I think part of this is true, I think in the short term (1-1.5 years) you are not including two major factors in ASIC mining that will contribute heavily to how the mining aspect of cryptocurrency plays out:

• Ease of Acquiring

This is a big deal right now.  If you weren't already in the game and have some BTC, you cannot currently easily buy an ASIC miner.  Up until this point, mining was driven by the ability for someone technically capable to go online and spend fiat to either buy another CPU, or buy more GPUs and have them running within a week or two.  This is no longer the case, and until ASICs are put out by a few companies, shipping within a week, and selling for fiat - there will be a significant amount of miners who have a vested interest in keeping GPU mining relevant.

• Specificity of Application

Separately, it is no longer a trivial decision for a miner to decide to start mining by using an ASIC.  This isn't buying a CPU that you can use all the time and turn on to mine when you're sleeping.  It's not a GPU you can use when not mining for awesome graphics.  You can't resell an ASIC for anything other than Bitcoin mining - and if Bitcoin goes away, it's worthless.  This shifts mining from something that can be done by anyone to now a smaller group who is buying equipment for just that purpose and likewise will need a higher ROI to break even.

These two factors above will absolutely play a big role in the mid-term while the ease of acquiring ASICS works itself out.  Scrypt and LTC could go away, but I don't think that will be the case.


Overall, I think this is the most sound plan - one that I intend to follow, but only once I can sell my GPUs and have that sale money turned around to buy an ASIC in the same week.  Buying GPUs now is a riskier investment, but hardly a guarantee to be a failure either - it's impossible to say what a brand new fresh batch of speculators would do when LTC pops up on a big exchange and they want to diversify some of their investment in a coin that they can buy a large quantity of for cheap on a psychological level.[/list]

ASICs may be coming, but pre-ordering is stupid because you can at least begin to mine right now with a GPU instead of having to wait/pray for deliveries. I am speculating that the wave of ASICs will drive up the difficulty rather quickly and as a result drive down the demand (people will quickly learn that ASICs aren't "money-printing machines"). The lower demand along with increased competition among suppliers (companies won't be "scalping" once they can efficiently bring more ASICs to the market and the demand is lower; maybe even new companies will come up with cheaper and cheaper designs) will cause the price of  ASICs to drop drastically. At that point, I will probably buy an ASIC, only if I can get a return on my investment.

But, putting my money in the hands of someone else when there are still nice profits to be made right now with GPUs is stupid. You are paying the price in terms of lost opportunity and paying a premium for something that will probably depreciate by 10-100x once production increases. I'm waiting for the cheap knock-offs, but in the meantime I'm keeping my money in my own hands and using GPUs to mine. If I really wanted to speculate, I would probably just buy btcs.

ThatDGuy nailed it

GPus do waste energy and asics saves energy by a big difference which outweighs the reusability of the gpu in my opinion not to say i dont want to mine with gpu just my opinion becasue i dont have asics i have no choice.

You have maybe a month left of being able to mine with GPUs. No GPU you buy today will be able to pay for itself that quickly.

Yes, people will stop buying ASICs when they realize they aren't making any money with them because difficulty is way up there (in the several hundred million range).

The problem is that enough ASICs to hit that number have already been sold (but not delivered) and people will continue to buy them until the difficulty actually gets that high.

You have to compete with:
- Avalon batch 2 (just began to ship)
- Avalon batch 3 (shipping soon)
- ASICMiner USB and blades (blades available now, USB shipping soon)
- BFL 60,000+ orders (ok they may never ship all their orders, but they will ship enough to make an impact of difficulty)
- A couple of hundreds thousand discrete Avalon chips
- ASICMiner's claimed 200 TH they are adding this summer

All of those have already been paid for and are on their way. It's too late for GPUs.

Yes, all the present GPU miners would love to keep GPU mining relevant but that is not going to happen just because they want it. There have already been enough ASICs pre-ordered and on their way to kill GPU mining for good. I listed them in moy other thread, but you have 2 batches of Avalon miners, plus hundreds of thousands of discrete chips, all the BFL pre-orders, ASICMiner USB and Blade sales, plus the 200TH ASICMiner is adding this summer. That is ASICs that are already coming. They were ordered long ago and just beginning to ship now. Even if a single new ASIC was never sold from here on out, GPU mining would still be dead. I don't think GPU mining can survive a couple hundred million difficulty and that is what we are going to see soon.


GPU mining can only live due to litecoin. But I believe litecoin will die sooner than later because it is purely used for speculation. You can't spend it anywhere and it offers 0 advantages over bitcoin. It's going to be a market of litecoin miners selling litecoins to each other. No one else buys them.

When ASICs are cheap and easy to buy within a week they won't be profitable anymore. The margins will be so low that only people with free electricity will even bother. Competition will drive the price down so they just barely make their money back, I'm guessing in a year or two. It will be a low margin grind and won't be much fun except for those who really enjoy mining for it's own sake.

the only factor here are the baldes, and usb(but they have low hash power) all the others, are vaporware for now, and this trend will continue at least until end of august

Obviously you don't visit the custom hardware subforum.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=209077.20 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=209077.20)

Does that look like vaporware?  Batch 2/3 should be completed by June (their new shipping got to the US in 3 days).  Those alone will double the current difficulty - putting a lot of miners into negative earnings territory.  Only people winter mining should consider continuing past June with any real hope of profits.

If friedcat gets those 200TH online then that will be nail in the coffin.

increased network difficulty only means that someone will make less btc, not less $... amount of earned $ could be smaller, but at the same time, perhaps with even larger probability, it could be greater since btc derives value from resources invested in it... btc gpu mining will stay as winner in number of peers, you can bet on that... custom asic and fpga producers will never have production capabilities as ati and nvidia, since there will always be more gamers in the world than miners... small custom lines will produce asics and large scale will produce gpus... in 5 years, asics will be cheaper to some degree, but market delivery of gpu compared to asic will be the same...

for asic blades, i mean everything produced by avalon, they are the only one legit , they also need to double the hash to make the diff x2, and those avalon asic are expensive, few people will buy them, in the end at least until the end of this summer, gpu are not dead

The 1200 Avalon ASICs from batch 2 and 3 ALREADY SOLD will add roughly 80 TH/sec to the world hashing power. That alone will double the difficulty.

All I can say is that when I sell my GPU's I am getting almost what I paid for them after a year or more of mining.  I have sold 5970's for more then I paid for them, including recent sales over $350 with an original cost of $329 (new).  If you buy and sell GPU's carefully you will do fine even now.  Today the card to buy is 7950's, especially if you can get them used, rebated or discounted. 

i'm still not worried, i'll stop mining with my gpu only when the difficulty will reach 50m

I am making the argument that it's too late for ASICs at their current prices. The people that are losing are those that have paid a hefty premium on hardware that has still not materialized. I'll wait till ASICs are dirt cheap to join the clusterfuck. While I'm at it, I hope to pick up some nice gpus for cheap once that wave hits ebay.

Don't suppose you'd like to wager on that? 

GPUs are one of the easier things to turn for a profit on eBay.  Wait for a good price, buy the correct GPU, you have a profit the day it arrives on your doorstep.

I suppose the real question would be, would I make more money by turning it over immediately, or would I make more money by mining with it for a month or two before selling it?

Well, that'd depend on which GPU you bought... and if you're buying 7950's and 7970's, the answer would probably be no.

Im willing to say it should be by the end of summer even or end of thsi year even who knows the diff is going up 1mil every ten days so by the end of summer or october could be 50 mil you never know whats out there till it happens but if asics ships its all over just go to litecoin then i guess. 

Could be worse...  I found 3 olllllld machines buried in the equipment room here at work.  Figured what the hell, I don't pay for power here so I ordered up 3 7950's and got all three machines happily crunching away in the equipment room next to all the servers and other random loud machines.  It's a massive power hungry building already so 3 extra machines is only a drop in the bucket for power.  I run "IT" here anyway so no one even noticed.  Figured I'd just let them sit there and do their thing until... well until they died.

Two months later got offered new job (yay!) out of the blue, and now I'm leaving here in 3 weeks.  Don't really want to set them up at home (power costs not really worth it) and I'm pretty sure I won't be able to set them up at the new place.

Ah well, it was fun while it lasted.  Did manage to pay for almost 2 of the cards with mined BTC so no real loss really I guess.

I can give you an address to ship them... ;)

Excuse me if if I've overlooked any of my points being made already in this thread, I read the first half and skimmed the second.

It seems you're overlooking two very important factors:

1) Mining LTC to trade to BTC may have dwindled in efficiency such that at the time of trading, you're making a little above electricity costs. BUT BTC is on steady growth. Who here would be involved in Bitcoin if they were convinced it was going back down to double digits or worse? Until you cash out to fiat, you have no idea how much profit you've made.

2) If you don't have a USD bank account, mining is the easiest way to accumulate Bitcoin. You won't get hassled by your bank, you won't take chances with eBay, PayPal etc. The riskiest part is if your mining pool collapses before you've taken your latest payment: a negligible risk of losing a relatively small amount.

If BTC is alive once all blocks have been mined I'm sure those without ASICs would look back with hindsight and regret not mining well into seemingly unprofitable territory.

Hell if you can make the cost of  your electricity back: carry on mining!

I'll be mining long after the snapshot "price right now" profitability goes negative.

So you've been stealing electricity from work and now you can't anymore. My heart weeps for you.

Heh, if it's too cold in my office, I turn on a 2KW fan heater I have under my desk.  Is that "stealing electricity" too?  Or boiling the kettle to make a cup of coffee?

That is for your comfort at the workplace, not for your profit outside of the workplace. Pretty obvious difference.

Yes stop buying gpus, start selling what you have, and pm your prices :P

Your absolutely right and completely wrong all at the same time  ;)

It is a goldrush mentality with all these btc newbies flooding in and they all want the new best thing, so they order themselves a BFL rig and two weeks later wonder why it didnt arrive??? So then they start reading the forums  :o   Whoops.

IMO GPU's are the only thing worth buying at this stage of the game. Anyone building a rig at this particular moment to "turn a financial profit" is just an idiot to begin with.

Exactly.  I bought four 7870 Tahiti's that easily get 450Mhash each. They were $199 (after rebate which has already come in) and came with THREE games that I sold for $25 each.  So that $800 was automatically down to $550 after I sold the games, and they are generating about $12-14 per day.  Yeah, a month later they are 1/2 paid off.  If I listened to every chicken little out there a month ago, I'd be missing out. In short, do your OWN calculations and let the forum jockeys figure prey on some other newb.

I beg to differ on the "outlook of alt-coins".
http://dustcoin.com/mining

Value in coins = DEBT, our DEBT/LOSS (For buying cards, for processing transactions with power, and for maintnance.)

When BTC goes ASIC... THEY will have less debt, less loss, and "can sell for a lower price, because it is not a loss to them." However, the majority of all coins have already been mined by (DEBT/LOSS), and thus, the price is highly resistant to negative change. (I said resistant, not immune.)

However, once we move to ALT-COINS, the first thing we do is cash-out the BTC, which leaves even less for them to be able to "cash out", since we (the majority), will not be participating in the promotion of something we can't make, and since we (the majority), were clearly pushed-out and the only real major purchasers of the coins. (Us and our friends.) Plus, our debt is "in hand", they still have to MINE for the debt they just created for themselves.

Thus, the value, will shift from the "easy to earn" (for them), BTC... to the "harder to earn", alt-coins (for us). Well, the alt-coins that they can't effectively participate in.

Or, we simply come up with a whole new set of code, that better secures a place for ASIC's, GPU's, and CPU's... and we all win.

When it is down to "3-top-dogs" running the market, with no effort put forth to securing the network, the users, or those who built the foundation... Then the only thing they will end-up with is pure DEBT, and a bunch of worthless coins that no-one wants to use.

Do you want to use a dollar that doesn't maintain its value? A dollar that you can't cash-in, or exchange for another purposeful currency? A dollar that was created by smothering greedy thieves, who openly used and manipulated everyone into believing that they would be doing THEMSELVES good, by giving them money, which was going to be used to smother them out of the market?

I doubt it.

The community (majority), has spoken, and people are listening. Bitcoin is now hitting the "news" in a new light, due to ASICs... At this moment, I wouldn't want to be in any ASIC users shoes. Though I have one shoe coming, sometime this year, I hope... but not enough to threaten the state of the market.

I am all for adding value to debt. There are plenty of ways to add value to our "processing network", besides JUST mining for coins, to get coins. (Hint hint... "render farms", "cloud super-computing", "Formulated compression", etc... The hard part is convincing them to PAY us in BTC or an ALT-COIN of choice... instead of "cash". Thus, supporting the "exchange".)