balu on 10:56:27 AM----Close enough to sound true, without being true
I do occasionally mine DRK. The current split is the other way around 37.5% to the masternodes and 62.5% to the miners, but not all blocks go to the masternodes
4.64 DRK Block reward, should equate 2.90DRK reward to miners, but because a lot of blocks do not go to the masternodes (I have Darksend switched off on my wallet) the effective rewards to miners average 3.42DRK per block (thank you darkcoin.miningpoolhub.com for their block statistics).
576 Blocks a day, equals 2,672DRK a day and this equals 975,513DRK per annum. At BTC price of 0.007, the entire per annum production is only work 6826BTC at a BTC price of $230 (thank you Bitstamp for BTC price 15:25GMT) equals $1,570,200 per annum net value.
This is insufficient for any manufacturers to develop an ASIC miner, if potential sales are 50% of the value of potential DRK production in 1st year of production ($785,100) and these sales equate to a 10% profit margin $78,510 and 10% of this is spent on research and development this equals a R&D budget of just $7,851. You can see, you cannot finance the R&D costs of creating a piece of new silicon for X11. It takes about 9-12 months to research and develop new silicon for algorithms designed for GPU's.
From the scrypt algorithm's history, 2013 LTC price reached an average $11. Per annum production is 10,512,000 (this is x10 DRK's yearly production). This equated to BTC value 0.0478 per LTC (at BTC's price today) and per annum production was worth 502,473BTC or $115,568,790. This use to work out to be: 50% of yearly production being potential sales $57,784,4395 in the 1st year, which use to work out to be potential profits (at 10% of turnover) $5,778,439, which worked out to fund a $577,843 R&D budget.
Four manufacturer succeeded in bringing to market ASIC equipment in 2014 (Gridseed, Zeus, KCNminer, Innosilicon). This allows us to divide the research and development costs of new ASIC silicon by 4 equaling $144,460, but we will say 5 to turn this into the worse case scenario for DRK, £115,568
Now, we can reverse the macro economic model to forecast the price at which DRK would become attractive for ASIC manufacturers to develop new silicon
$115,568 R&D, require profits of £1,155,680 which equate to sales turnover being around $11,556,800. Since, turnover is 50% of annual production in the 1st year (it declines by 50% per annum assuming prices hold up to new Fiat Currency withdrawals from the system to pay for ASICs) then net per annum value of DRK production will need to be $23,113,600, which would price each coin at $23.69 or 0.103BTC per coin
Let's face facts, only a kamikaze manufacturer would develop an X11 ASIC silicon at the moment, when the price passes $18 one or two might take on the risks, but we are nowhere near those prices
