If you consider the sheer number of ASICs reportedly in queue the difficulty rise will be large enough to diminish returns to the point of never achieving return on investment. Say you currently mine 25GH which is about 1/1000th of the total. That probably costs about 20K in GPUs and boards.
Now to have 1/1000th of the hash after ASIC stabilizes you would probably need to spend well over $20k.
Unless you got in very early on the ASIC batches you're probably screwed as people will keep tossing money at it in hopes of getting rich.
I think the only ones who will see guaranteed profits from ASIC are the manufacturers (like a gun dealer arming both sides).
This is the sort of thing I'm worried about. But don't miners make a profit mining with their GPU rigs now? Why wouldn't ASIC rigs make money once all of this levels out? When the difficulty goes up, wont the value of BTC change to reflect that?
Difficulty is related to price, but both are reactionary to each other. If the difficulty goes up and the price doesn't, a lot of miners who instantly sell what they mine usually turn off their rigs. Then the difficulty goes down and then they power them back on again.
With ASIC however, once somebody buys that dedicated hasher it's on the network permanently. People are unlikely to retask the ASIC units for any other purpose, so difficulty will only go up from here on, never down.
GPUs also had the advantage of easy resale. Most of the GPUminers have already paid off their cards. There was minimal risk buying 20 7970s if you got a decent price. Even if you lost $50 on each that's only 1k. Good luck selling your ASICs if Bitcoin fails.
At this point if you don't have an early ASIC order I would say hold off and just buy BTC. If you bought when this thread was made and sold today you would have made 15% in that short time!
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