Get me outta here please? Looking to post in the marketplace (WTB), but still haven't hit my timing. Take a look at all the posts I've made; I'm not really a newbie to Bitcoin but am to this forum.

most likely just lots of gpus coming online from the press spike.

http://blockchain.info/pools doesn't show anything too crazy (i wanna know who that 6GH/s pool miner is though in btc guild)

i don't agree they will cost millions to make. and if they do, they will likely not be very profitable given the distribution. rewards will be very split by then, and the system re-adjusts difficulty levels to where this will probably be a losing race if you're dropping $5M+ on a mining asic. most people with that kind of funds will be working bitcoin exchanges and trading with algorithmic systems to capture value, since youd basically need to be an investment bank to have that type of capital to throw at mining.

the bitcoin model of cryptocurrencies creates pseudo-oligarchies by its early-adopter incentive policy. if you want to make a democratic form of power, you create a marxist even-allocation cryptocurrency where the allocation is entirely flat across users. you sign up for marx coin, you get 25 mxc, and you're done. which will never work, because that's not how people work. they want to be able to have the edge on something. i'd bet a lot of money that btc would never have taken off without its money supply growth structure that incentivized early adopters for their troubles. nobody would have given a shit.

the problem you have with wealth distribution and this money supply model is the same one i have. i agree it sucks, but it's better to take that up with human nature instead of bitcoin's design.

A jalapeno is at 4.5GH/s. you'll be waiting a few months for one.

see:
http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/

setting difficulty way high (32M) given your lead time, keeping the conversion rate the same, and electricity at $0.15/kWh, you'll see $4.82 a day. it'd pay for itself in about a month at that difficulty level. this doesn't include power for the PC its hooked up to.

you can still be profitable with gpu, but probably not for much longer.
get on the asic waitlist at bfl or pool money for an avalon.

great thanks for clarifying. i might be interested, need to check my ag holdings vs btc, etc

short answer is no, it does not centralize bitcoin. it redistributes wealth to a few, but a few is an oligopoly at best. and oligopolies are still technically decentralized.

think of it this way: just because big banks hold billions or trillions of dollars, it does not centralize the currency in that bank. the banks are decentralized and competing against one another, and everyone else that has dollars at all. any little small business, or individual citizen. basically, it works like this:

1. someone makes lots of asics. in this case, avalon.
2. USD/EUR rich people become asic rich.
3. USD/EUR rich people become BTC rich people.

companies like avalon cannot consistently sustain massive profitability, and the bitcoin difficulty will skyrocket, making the competition harder, and further decreasing demand for expensive ASIC mining machines. to maintain profitability as an asic manufacturer you will need to make cheaper machines, which is possible. you just make smaller ones.

4. product segmentation occurs to capture more market share and value, 1 ASIC boards (e.g. jalapeno) come out at accessible prices.
5. USD/EUR poor people buy asics.
6. USD/EUR poor people get relatively richer in BTC, but not as fast as the guys that had the ASICs first because of hashrate->difficulty changes.
7. ASIC poor people (ie, people on GPUs) get f*cked completely at this point.

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an aside: look at all the exchanging going on here.
USD/EUR->BTC->asic
BTC->asic
gpu/fpga->BTC->asic
gpu/fpga->USD/EUR->asic
gpu/fpga->EUR/USD->BTC->asic
gpu/fpga->BTC->EUR/USD->asic

note each of these has different, fluctuating exchange rates in and of themselves. the math is not as simple as have asic? more usd.
---

what you are confusing here is wealth distribution vs. centralization. everyone can still take part in the supply of bitcoins, even if there are ASIC guys. you don't need mining hardware to get a btc now, you can get one from mt gox by trading other commodities. some guy that has massive amounts of coins from GPU mining in 2010 is still powerful enough to make fluctuations on btc exchanges, especially because btc is FAR less liquid than other currencies.

a centralized currency is one in which one party can fundamentally control its flow. there is no central bank of bitcoin, no planning committee. what we may see is a heavy disparity of income distribution (economists call this a gini coefficient), but most likely bitcoins will fall into something pareto-like in distribution (80% of btc wealth is held by 20% of the population). but that's just distribution. it's not centralized.

the ASIC by itself will probably not cause centralization. a monopoly is required for centralization, and there is no monopoly on ASIC right now, and likely will not be. if someone sees a market opening they will build ASICs, just like the FPGA guys did and you had 10-20 vendors. you and 1000 other people could start an asic manufacturing cooperative if you wanted to, and build your own asics. nobody owns the exclusive right to asics. some people will just get richer first.

why are people doing this? is it because of btc viruses, or something? or are you just paranoid?

what price are these preorders usually going for?

good luck getting a avalon in the third batch. $6000+ per asic. ones on ebay right now going for $15-30k+

i believe in bfl at this point, things are coming along even if they are slower than avalon.

what is your btc/oz exchange rate?

right now on mtgox
1 btc = $76.79
1 oz ag = $28.69
that's about 2.67 silver eagles per btc at silver electronic spot prices.

you can use one login across multiple computers, but there isn't a point to doing so. set up multiple pools and a login for each miner, and most pools will give you alerts if your computer goes down.

50 C is not really a whole lot of heat. My GPU sits at 75 degrees C in cgminer 24x7 and I have not had any problems with it. If you want your GPU to last 10 years you probably don't want to run at 100% load, but it should be totally fine for years until it becomes obsolete.