All these asics are going to crank up the difficulty until ETH mining is sitting at the bottom of the charts than everyone who spent money on these asics will cry well stop supporting asics manufactures
As many others have been saying throughout this thread - PoS (Proof of Stake) is coming!
I realize the Ethereum team is WAY behind schedule when it comes to implementing any type of PoS protocol, however, this is much more complicated than most people realize. Regardless, the PoS implementation will happen slowly over time, and PoW will not just be suddenly switched off one day. In Vitalik’s Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget (FFG) project, PoS implementation would be slowly transitioned into Ethereum mining over time, while reducing PoW mining rewards until they ultimately reach zero.
To keep on topic, PoW Ethereum mining is not going away anytime soon in my opinion. I was lucky to have had the opportunity to purchase the first batch Antminer E3 for $800 USD some time ago, and although I don't care for the manufacturer, I have been happy with the product and results. Compared to my six 8GB NVIDIA GeForce 1070Ti GPU rigs, the Antminer E3 is currently the much less expensive and overall better choice to mine Ethereum (although the resale value will ultimately diminish, the ROI time is ~5-6 times less).
I am in favor of GPU/CPU mining vs ASIC mining, but the opportunity to purchase ~190 MH/s of stable Ethereum mining that uses ~800 Watts of power for $800 USD is a very sharp double edged sword! Although very limited and not at all versatile when compared to the mineable asset options of a GPU, these ASIC miners
can mine other assets as well.
In summary, building a huge Ethereum ASIC mining farm is certainly not the best idea for most, purchasing a few of these miners might not be such a bad idea for some..
I did a calculation. With the 0.16$/kWh electricity price, the ASIC will earn about $1 per day. The ROI is about 800 days now.
