ASIC Miners longevity?
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So what with most Scypt ASIC miners due out in Q2/Q3 what are everyone’s thoughts on investment in one?
I’m considering investment in a lower end model from Alpha Technologies to avoid being pushed out of mining the same 6 months I got into it, however In order to do so I can see myself having to take out a small personal loan. But I have some concerns regarding their longevity;
1. The increase in mining difficulty is going to sky rocket in a matter of months from their release if not before as I can imagine most companies releasing them will wind up “testing” them for a month or so before shipping. Meaning that a lower end model may wind up obsolete within the year?
2.It’s a current GPU miner’s worst night mare thus will measures actually be put in place to keep them out e.g increasing memory usage of GPU’s (alot of R9 uses claim this can be done as only 1/3 of the higher end model’s memory is being used).
3. Will ASIC technology mean a huge decline in coin price… All scrypt based coins are going to be in abundance are they not? I can see alot of miners piling their months earnings into exchanges to make their initial ROI / buy a second round of miners. Thus can it be fair to say at least initially alot of coins are going to suffer until they begin to spread enough that they start to settle down.
There have been alot of discussions regarding the up and coming technology, however alot of it is blind denial on behalf of those who have invested heavily in GPU mining. But the reality is they are coming and they are close to + 60% $/Hash and 30 X cheaper in power consumption!
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It depends which coin you want to mine. Feathercoin is busy working on an alternative to ASIC as we believe they tend to centralise the mining to a few rich individuals who can afford the huge cost of the ever spiraling cost of each round of ASIC. We want to stay a GPU coin that can be mined by anyone who can afford a graphics card which tends to be a larger group of people making the mining more decentralised. You can see this has happened with bitcoin.
I’m sure other coins will be happy about the scrypt ASICs but they can’t possibly create more coins as this is determined by the difficulty based on the time it takes to mine a coin. All it will do it make the difficulty skyrocket and make GPU mining untenable.
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I’m really glad I sold my Gridseeds 3 days after I got them and cancelled my KNCMiner order. Have you seen the lads trying to fork Litecoin with x11? I don’t think the market has the stomach for another wave of ASICs to be honest.
I’m predicting most currencies adopting Scrypt-N or something similar…
