The average total coins generated across the network per day stays the same. Faster machines just get a larger share than slower machines. If everyone bought faster machines, they wouldn't get more coins than before.
We should have a gentleman's agreement to postpone the GPU arms race as long as we can for the good of the network. It's much easer to get new users up to speed if they don't have to worry about GPU drivers and compatibility. It's nice how anyone with just a CPU can compete fairly equally right now.
That is very interesting. I never actually thought about it before. It's a very Utopian theory on mining, and sharing the wealth. But he's right, of course. He was a smart guy, whoever he was.
If everybody on the network had 10M/h each vs if everybody on the network had 100T/h each, or even if everybody had 1h/s. Everyone would receive exactly the same number of coins in any of those scenarios.
It's only because of greed, and people wanting to get more than their share, that there exists huge gpu farms, and asic's and such. But if everybody agreed to just use the cpu in their pc, and there were no asic's or gpu's at all. Then difficulty would be many orders of magnitude smaller than it is now, and most people receive exactly the same amount of coins that they get today. But WITHOUT having to spend $1000's on dedicated mining hardware, and without wasting tons of electricity and killing the environment.
So maybe all the cpu-only mined coins are more correct than I initially gave them credit for... They are much more in line with Satoshi's original philosophy. But they now suffer from the problem of cloud-based virtual farms taking over...