What will happen to all the "traditional" mines once the new ASIC based miners

[Korbman]

The big change I see coming is newer miners wont be able to jump in and try on existing hardware, mining has brought a lot of people to Bitcoin, soon they will need to buy dedicated hardware to participate.

You bring up a very good point. Given that most tech savvy individuals (really anyone with a computer) have some sort of graphics card in their computer, it was super easy to get into bitcoin and mining. Most participants I know in my [real] life tried out mining just for fun with the hardware they had. At the rate we're going, those same individuals probably wouldn't find the same interest in bitcoin once they learn that serious miners have to dedicate their money to certain hardware.

It's one thing to invest in a high end graphics card that can serve a purpose besides mining, it's a whole other game when the hardware can only do 1 thing.

[1714707929]

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[1714707929]

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[crazyates]

They're not for serious miners, but I see Jalapenos as filling that role. Something small that people can get started on.

Still not the same as "Hey, let me turn on my GPU"...

[firefop]

The big change I see coming is newer miners wont be able to jump in and try on existing hardware, mining has brought a lot of people to Bitcoin, soon they will need to buy dedicated hardware to participate.

You bring up a very good point. Given that most tech savvy individuals (really anyone with a computer) have some sort of graphics card in their computer, it was super easy to get into bitcoin and mining. Most participants I know in my [real] life tried out mining just for fun with the hardware they had. At the rate we're going, those same individuals probably wouldn't find the same interest in bitcoin once they learn that serious miners have to dedicate their money to certain hardware.

It's one thing to invest in a high end graphics card that can serve a purpose besides mining, it's a whole other game when the hardware can only do 1 thing.

I understand what you're saying, but I don't think that you drew the correct assumption. As a gamer, if I'm willing to drop 400-600 bucks on a new video card every time one releases, I shouldn't have any problem buying hardware in that same price range if I want to mine.... I could still see some fractional generation of btc as from a video card to 'test it out' enough to decide to buy hardware or not. At some point it becomes a way to earn vs a hobby.

And I'd rather spend on a product that will let me game while mining... Instead of having to choose between income and gaming time.
 

[Transisto]

Take no offense but I think the community will improve with less interest from gamers.

The big change I see coming is newer miners wont be able to jump in and try on existing hardware, mining has brought a lot of people to Bitcoin, soon they will need to buy dedicated hardware to participate.

... As a gamer, if I'm willing to drop 400-600 bucks on a new video card every time one releases, I shouldn't have any problem buying hardware in that same price range if I want to mine.... I could still see some fractional generation of btc as from a video card to 'test it out' enough to decide to buy hardware or not. At some point it becomes a way to earn vs a hobby.

And I'd rather spend on a product that will let me game while mining... Instead of having to choose between income and gaming time.

You will be mining BTCs on a GPU the way you would now with CPUs.  -Completely irrelevant amounts.

[RaTTuS]

in the old days it was easy to get into bitcoins
download the client and run it on your cpu's
then came gpu mining
a bit harder download a miner , find a pool , and join and run it ..., don't bother with cpu mining
next year sometime gpu mining will be out..
it will be hard for people to get into mining
though more people will want to buy coins, the exchanges will become even bigger ,
mining will be more centralised.

[Korbman]

I understand what you're saying, but I don't think that you drew the correct assumption. As a gamer, if I'm willing to drop 400-600 bucks on a new video card every time one releases, I shouldn't have any problem buying hardware in that same price range if I want to mine.... I could still see some fractional generation of btc as from a video card to 'test it out' enough to decide to buy hardware or not. At some point it becomes a way to earn vs a hobby.

And I'd rather spend on a product that will let me game while mining... Instead of having to choose between income and gaming time.

Right, but you're a dedicated miner with disposable income (or at least this is my assumption). What I'm saying is that the bar to entry has been raised for the average joe-shmoe, which makes it that much more likely they won't develop the same interest in bitcoin mining as me or you.

[HDSolar]

My thoughts on this are that with Bitcoin you have a legacy or stable example of crypto currency but as others come about those will offer options for different kinds of equipment to operate that currency.  I almost see this as Bitcoin being the gold standard while others become Siliver, Coper and other precious metals as an example of what could happen in the near future.  As specialized equipment and or code develops over time others will establish options to utilize existing tools to develop less developed projects.  Actually I think this is a great time for all of us because we are getting in and establishing what could be a major effort my only question is what will it turn into as we go.  Now this is all just a guess and by no means am I saying that bitcoin is the gold standard that it will be that way but for now that is how it looks. 
My two cents 

[tacotime]

Today marks the day I switch to litecoin mining, as one the diff change in 10hr for btc I'll be making less mining BTC.  Come join me at http://ltc.kattare.com , just set cgminer --scrypt -g 1 --shaders [number for your card] and then raise your memory speed

[vitruvio]

You did your calculations, I guess. Were you aware that a GPU mining LTC spends more energy that mining BTC?

Regards

[tacotime]

You did your calculations, I guess. Were you aware that a GPU mining LTC spends more energy that mining BTC?

Regards

yeah, but even with the extra 70w i'll be making more with the diff increase.  bitcoin's diff is rising way faster than its price.  not only this, but ltc in going up in value way faster than btc.

[firefop]

Right, but you're a dedicated miner with disposable income (or at least this is my assumption). What I'm saying is that the bar to entry has been raised for the average joe-shmoe, which makes it that much more likely they won't develop the same interest in bitcoin mining as me or you.

Granted - but I think the trade off there is we'll start to see new investors backing bitcoin based businesses... due the increased hash power and much greater stability in the market side. I'm expecting the transactions per block capacity of the network to increase quickly once asics are in the wild... and that should start opening doors to let bitcoin compete with existing payment processing networks (bankwires,  western union, etc).

It should start an upward spiral... the faster the network, the better chance of getting outside money to build a POS system or some service leveraged through existing market penetration --- which would lead to more transaction fees being collected which would help offset the increase in network hash rate (from a mining perspective) and on and on... eventually making mining profitable for the transaction fees, nevermind the block reward.

[Stephen Gornick]

What will happen to all the "traditional" mines once the new ASIC based miners hit the market?

Those with NVidia hardware might want to look at CoinLab's program:

Protect your future GPU mining earnings with CoinLab's 95-97% PPS Pool
  - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99643.0


There may be other computational work developments as well.  For example:
 - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=119611.0
 - http://www.HashBounty.net
 - https://vanitypool.appspot.com/faq

[Edited:  Added Vanitypool mining.]

[Odi]

I was late to the GPU game (found out about BTC in July 2011 and didn't get any hardware worth using until August 2011).  I mined in a pool until I made back my $200 investment in 2x5770's (but I held the BTC instead of selling them), then switched to solo mining with 400MH/s when the pool I was in was eventually shut down because the owner didn't have time to maintain it.  The heat and energy cost was minor (it's just 2 GPUs and I leave my computer on anyway), so I didn't mind paying an extra monthly expense knowing that I could possibly never find a block.

I was lucky and found 2 blocks solo mining in 10 months (the best way is to forget it is in the background...I didn't even know I had found the second block in July until last week when I needed to reboot my computer).  So I used those two lucky blocks to pre-order a bASIC, but if it never shows up, I will probably point that measly 400MH/s to solo mining anyway even if other ASICs deliver.

[abbeytim]

a bunch will switch to ltc (litecoin) mining

[Stephen Gornick]

a bunch will switch to ltc (litecoin) mining

Every time I see that assertion I think of this:




With Bitcoin about $80K USD worth of bitcoins are distributed to the hashing provided by miners.   With Litecoin that is about $2K USD worth of LTC issuance.

Since each addtional GPU becomes essentially another mouth to feed it lowers the revenue for the other miners.  The reason the GPUs will be arriving is because they could no longer mine bitcoin profitably.  They won't stick with mining LTC unless it too can be done so profitably.

i.e., it soon will be time to power down your GPU rigs.

[crazyates]

a bunch will switch to ltc (litecoin) mining

Every time I see that assertion I think of this:




With Bitcoin about $80K USD worth of bitcoins are distributed to the hashing provided by miners.   With Litecoin that is about $2K USD worth of LTC issuance.

Since each addtional GPU becomes essentially another mouth to feed it lowers the revenue for the other miners.  The reason the GPUs will be arriving is because they could no longer mine bitcoin profitably.  They won't stick with mining LTC unless it too can be done so profitably.

i.e., it soon will be time to power down your GPU rigs.

I think most people who are going to jump to LTC will do so hoping the price will increase. But then I wonder, if they're expecting the price to increase just to the point it's profitable, why is the price not going up today, when you can buy them for cheap? My only conclusion: nobody cares.

[Korbman]

I think most people who are going to jump to LTC will do so hoping the price will increase. But then I wonder, if they're expecting the price to increase just to the point it's profitable, why is the price not going up today, when you can buy them for cheap? My only conclusion: nobody cares.

Haha you're probably quite right on this one. I started mining litecoins a few weeks ago, but I don't really see the point. If anything, the price of LTC/BTC is going down.

[tonto]

Many people claim to have free electricity, or is a gamer so won't stop his GPU.

Regards

This.  I've always kept my machine on even before discovering bitcoins.  I typically ran various distributed networking projects such as folding@home, distributed.net, etc.  Plus I'm a pretty avid gamer and will always have top-of-the-line (or a few months old) vid cards and might as well have them contribute to mining.  I may stop them once they become the equivalent of crappier CPUs (that is, only contributing like .5% or worse of my total hashing power).  But I'll only do that to quiet down my man-cave and make my place of Zen again
 
Or if I can figure out how to use the wasted heat from the cards to heat my fish tank, I'll keep 'em going and turn off my tank heaters (since my PC is on a UPS and my fish tank heaters aren't)