If hardware can not be bought off the shelf for next day delivery then it just makes the entire mining game and ELITIST business just like the banks.
And if hardware could be bought off the shelf for next day delivery, then most people would not bother to mine because they would only be earning pennies on top of ROI.
Don't worry though, the day will come when ASICs become a readily available commodity. Once that happens people will be spending their resources searching for other things, such as cheap 0.02 cent/Kwh electricity.
That argument is so flawed - so no one was mining bitcoins until ASICS became available? So what were people mining with back in 2008? I think you will find a great deal more people were mining Bitcoins with off the shelf hardware than they were with ASICS for the past 5 years.
When ASICs become readily available you will have to spend $100,000 on hardware just to have any kind of decent profit. I don't know many people accept for large businesses that will throw $100,000 at hardware so kind of putting it in the elitist territory.
I am willing to bet that are more people mining with ASICs today (including USB block eruptors) than there were CPU miners in late 2010.
That wasn't my point though. Mining will always be competitive and the so-called "elitists" will always control the hashrate. For example, in early 2011 when GPU mining was very profitable picking up ATI 5870's and 5970's were is short supply. People like Vladimir who had direct access to a hardware distributor cornered all the available high end GPUs and built his giant GPU farm. Other people like myself were left with low-end 5830's. (I still manged to mine over 1000 BTC with 8 5830's in the spring of 2011).
Dude you have completely contradicted yourself - first you say no one would mine with off the shelf hardware and then go on to say that GPU's were very profitable in 2011. Which one is it - people do or do not mine with off the shelf hardware?
The difference between a 5830 and a 5970 is not 100X like the jump from GPU's to ASICs.
And furthermore what ASICs? There have been 3 batches of AVALON units with all of batch 2 not even been delivered yet - let alone batch 3 - Very few USB Erupters because at the price ASICminer were charging they would never pay for themselves and most people could do the maths on that one.
AVALON have been selling chips with only the developer samples actually delivered. BFL have delivered at best maybe 1000 5ghs and a few 500ghs units. Who else is there?
So in essence very few people have them yet they are now cornering the market - which again is totally against the ethos of bitcoins.
