When the Bitcoin Diffculty gets too high for regular users.

[CaptChadd]

Even for ASIC owners that have the lower end hardware (I have a 25 GH/s miner on order) once the difficulty gets to unprofitable levels of which the price of Bitcoin cannot match, will ASIC miners move to another SHA 256 based coin?

The only way in which the price of Bitcoin can continue to rise with the difficulty is if the general public stop thinking in terms of having to buy one whole Bitcoin and get into the decimal place real world. The decimal is there for a reason and they need to start using it and stop having this fascination with having to have a whole Bitcoin.

What does everyone else think? Will the general user accept the change into buying decimals of a Bitcoin or move to another coin that they can get whole amounts of, even if worth less?

These are just questions, I have no opinion as yet.

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[Elwar]

There are two things that will affect profitability with ASICs from here on out. The hardware will become cheaper with economies of scale and Bitcoin price will go up.

As more people get ASICs companies will crank them out like they're candy, the price will come down and the Bitcoin network will become more distributed.

I imagine future company policies will crack down on people running mining thumb drives at work because most of your cost will be in the electricity required.

[mgio]

no, not likely any other coin is going to be profitable to mine.

ASICs will cover their cost of electricity for quite a long time.

[jbreher]

Mining difficulty explodes. Bitcoin user unaffected.

If someone needs to be in on the production of the money supply in order to use the money, we have a conceptual flaw.

miner != regular user

[franky1]

Mining difficulty explodes. Bitcoin user unaffected.

If someone needs to be in on the production of the money supply in order to use the money, we have a conceptual flaw.

miner != regular user

over a hundred years ago when any man and his son could go out and mine for gold.. everyone got their hands in.. now are the days of the excavators, and people moved on to open shops, manufacturing and other methods of income to support themselves..

this is that time with the bitcoin economy. a swing away from mining, and into manufacturing/retailing for bitcoins is where people need to concentrate their profiting minds

[coinprize]

That would definitely effects. Bitcoin market is still fragile, volatile, and sort of lonely in cryto-currency, but will get better if more and more well-designed crpyto-currencies comes to play  and could inter-exchange from each other, things will get easier, all will settle down and stabilized.