Bitcoin Forum

Where is BTC mining heading?

Is mining still "democratic" and "accessible" to the masses?

Interesting reading: http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/bitcoins-computing-crisis

G

That's a Litecoin commercial.

"Gold mining is getting too hard. Let's mine tin instead!"

Yes Litecoin is the way to go...

Ultimately I think there's room for multiple cryptos to serve a solid role in commerce and trade in the future.  Litecoin has the advantage of faster transaction confirms, the PPCoin proof of stake is interesting, but it doesn't take away from the strength of the Bitcoin network due to being the original cryptocurrency.  A lot of alts are junk, but there are some interesting feature sets out there.

If anything though, the growing inability for the average person to acquire bitcoins easily is a good thing for its legitimacy as a currency.  Currency should be difficult to acquire or else it looses value.  If someone magically found a way to mine gold with a CPU tomorrow, the price would plummet.

As long as it doesn't become centralized, I see no reason that requiring a large upfront cost to mine bitcoin is a problem.  Who knows, maybe Intel will start throwing in a few dozen GH worth of Bitcoin ASIC into a future 14nm process CPU design.  Would be almost trivial for them to do and would give their customers a little bit of "free" income while further increasing the security of the network.

Bitcoin mining is for people that have $5K+ to gamble on maybe turning a profit, or the big mining companies who obviously always profit by having customers front all the money for their hashpower and can then decide when to ship their products after they mined enough coins on them.

Litecoin mining is much more democratic as ASIC is several years away from Scrypt, so GPUs are still the only way to go. But the margins are brutal and GPU mining is a lot of work for very very little profit, its honestly much better now to just buy Litecoins than spend hours tweaking configs and replacing worn out GPU fans to turn a tiny profit of a handful of coins per card.

i think the world has to accept bitcoin first if any altcoin is going to succeed.
and i doubt there will be a major need for a altcoin when ppl are starting to accept bitcoin.

but thats just my 2 cents.

Would guess the same as well. Assuming Bitcoin is succesfull there might be a need for a "better" Bitcoin 2.0, whichever one that might be then, in the future, but if it fails miserably its pretty unlikely anyone will want a "better failure".

they can always make changes to the bitcoin protocol as long as the miners accept them / updates the clients.