I'm fairly new to mining etc so can someone explain to me:
- why do GPU enthousiast always complain they would love to mine coins but can't because of asics, if the aim is to get hold of some coins, why spend money on a rack of GPU's and mine for months in a row instead of just buying loads of coins for the same amount of money ? is it really all about the joy of mining with a GPU, as in a hobby-thing ?
- why are asics considered a risk for centralisation, if a GPU only pool would have the majority of hashrate, isn't that just the same risk for centralization ?
1. ASICs are single-purpose computing devices while GPUs/CPUs are general purpose computing devices; when ASICs are developed for an algo they tend to deliver orders of magnitude greater hashrate, instantly rendering GPUs/CPUs obsolete.
Furthermore, most coins employ a difficulty adjustment algorithm of some sort that makes it harder to earn each coin as network (total) hashrate goes up; this implicitly assumes that the price of the coin has gone up a similar amount, however; when ASICs show up they result in a rapid increase the network hashrate - often by 100x or more - but the coin is still at the same point in its development path; ergo, difficulty goes up a huge amount while price changes relatively little. In DERO's case the coin price actually went up by ~10x - which, frankly, surprised the hell out of me - but network hashrate has gone up over 100x; i.e. - difficulty is 10x higher than it should be for the price of the coin.
As for whether you should mine a coin or buy it, well, that comes down to capital flexibility - when you buy a coin you can't do anything else with that money; when you buy a GPU, however, you can mine all sorts of different coins with it. In fact, it was possible to sell GPUs purchased at nearly any time in 2017 for a *profit* during the first couple of months of 2018, even if they were heavily used for mining; that pretty much never happens with ASICs, because their profitability drops from the moment they are switched on.
2. Mining pools can, indeed, lead to centralization, so you've correctly identified that issue. ASICs are a different cause of centralization in that companies like Bitmain can opt to hold back many of the ASICs they developed for an algo to continue mining coins with them. That is to say they could - and arguably should - use some fraction of their hardware to mine for themselves rather than sell to the public.