New research has found that unless the price of bitcoin goes up, there will be little room for new miners to compete.
In "Minting Money With Megawatts", released this September, Sveinn Valfells of Flux, Ltd and Jón Helgi Egilsson of the University of Iceland conduct a broad analysis of the health of transaction processing on the open public blockchain, ultimately finding that the network could be headed toward further consolidation and centralization.
http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-mining-600-profit-consolidation-competitive/
