Risk of ASIC proliferation

[stevegee58]

One of the things I always find ironic is how I "discovered" BTC and started mining with a 200 Mh/s 6770 GPU right at the bottom of that first retracement in hash rate and difficulty in Dec 2011.  It turns out I caught the almost exactly perfect time to enter as a new miner when difficulty took a big dip.

Difficulty will soon take off hockey stick fashion after the current dip.

[crazyates]

When FPGA came out, did all the GPU miners pack up and call it quits, leaving only FPGa units? Nope.

Yeah the network hashrate didn't jump up a giant percentage when FPGA units joined

Well that's because FPGAs were only marginally faster then GPUs. Their main advantage was in power savings. A closer analogy would be when GPUs started mining, and completely dominated the CPU mining network.



See that giant rise around the middle of 2010? That's when Poclbm was released.

Wrong chart, crazyates. That linear chart shows the effects of the price bubble mid 2011.

The chart below shows the effects you mention (look for the huge vertical leap in hashrate mid 2010):

I choose that one cuz I've never been a fan of log scale charts, but you're right that it shows the difference much better. Thank you!