Mining future

[barwizi]

With altcoins gaining more popularity since the advent of the ASIC, is it worthwhile to still buy g/cards like say 50 x 7950s? or would the money be better served 1) Trading alts or 2) Investing in these scrypt ASICs developers. is the chance of having an overwhelming amount of power in maybe a year worth more than having medium power now for a year, then later standing in line?

[lonesoul]

I just spent £1000 on 2 mining rigs to give me 2.2-2.4 Mh/s of Alt coin mining power :-) It bought them a week ago and so far i have made about £70 back on them through trading the coins they have mined.  so I'll get the money back but it might take a few more weeks, at which point i could then sell the machines for half the value (easily) or i could split them up and sell the insides (GPUs/Powers/Motherboards) for more than i bought the entire unit for. So as long you aren't expecting them to make the entire amount back solely on there own but are willing to put a bit of time in trading, i would still think its a good bet.

But then again it all depends on how much you can afford to spend/lose because you never know what might be round the corner to ruin the best laid plans

All the best

Stuart

[cryptrol]

Is there actually someone developing Scrypt ASIC (or even FPGA) ?
AFAIK Blockburner has just quit trying.

[barwizi]

very true, most ASIC plans are still on paper, but consider how the first investors got almost a year's worth of mining on BTC while others waited for their orders.

Say i get a 500mh prototype, with a six month lead on commercial production. looking at today's prices and difficulties, that would be quite the handicap.

[cryptrol]

Say i get a 500mh prototype, with a six month lead on commercial production. looking at today's prices and difficulties, that would be quite the handicap.

This situation would obviously be a great win, anyway investing in litecoin hardware development may produce unknown ouputs (if any).
I would aim my efforts in developing a system using some relatively inexpensive mainstream hardware (read SoC, mobile GPU chipsets, ...) that outperforms GPU's _at least_ in terms of energy efficiency at the same buying cost. I don't think hashing performance could be improved much (if at all) with this kind of development, and ASIC development is insanely expensive.