Your growth of 50% per month is right in line with my 1.5% per day that I linked above, which I think is on the high side for a long-term projection.
Jspielberg, what where you using for a growth rate?
thing is, if you look at the history part of the spreadsheet you'll see figurer near even above 50% from period to period, which indicates that 50% monthly growth certainly did occur in the last couple of months and consistently so.
question is will this trend continue.
pro arguments are clear:
- asic manufacturers did produce and are producing and are indeed shipping.
- people seem to be buying the stuff. at least judging form the sales of usb bitcoin erupters which seem to be constantly out of stock even though ROI calculations for this stuff is almost never positive.
- once paid for and installed, miners have little incentives to switch asics off. at least till difficulty is 1000x current level at which point cost of electricity becomes a factor again.
- by the end of the year next-gen hardware is expected to be available triggering another investment cycle.
the
con elements are weak:
- why bother mining with a 300 MH/s device at all? currently mining 24/7 for a month will yield 0.09
BTC which is roughly $9, by 1.1.2014 this will drop to 0.02
BTC/month or $2/month. Why would you bother with that at all? People should switch off just because the yields are meaningless.
- most vendors are not very reliable when it comes to shipping the product but they do request advance payment.
- at some point vendors will have to drop prices otherwise there will be no point in buying any mining hardware. so far they have been slow to do so.
Most importantly: huge increase in hash rate has detrimental effect on the number of individual miners. We should all know that the security of bitcoin relies in the distribution of hashing power not hashing power per se. One way to look at it is to imagine what would happen in the extreme case where we would have you one miner (let's say it's me) and this one miner would have a 10^100 (=googol) Hashes/s asic. Would network be safe under this scenario?
As always it is difficult to make predictions. Especially about the future.
