Time for an observation on this coin and mining method, I'd like your input.
After a few days of reading on it, it seems that the only real mining equipment needed is some multi-TB hard drives, otherwise any old computer can eventually make the plot files and be good enough to mine on.
But therein lies a problem. Cost of entry is low. It won't be long before someone with huge storage capacity jacks the difficulty into the stratosphere.
You've seen what happened when ASICs came out for Bitcoin, and then for Scrypt coins. Difficulty went sky high, everyone got less, and it takes a ton of money to even be a low level player.
So how long will it be before 100 TB worth of hard drives gets you one block per week? Of an unknown, untested, unproven alt coin that could price crash at any time?
At least with BTC ASICs, their high price slowed the addition of them a bit. Any jackhole here can call up Tiger Direct and order 100 4 TB drives at any time, and then we could see a run on large hard drives like what happened with GPUs last winter.
So part of me wants to get in on it, and part of me wants to say the hell with it, it's not worth the effort to be playing catch up and adding TBs of storage every few weeks.
And hard drives do not have good resale value.
And we are all solo mining now! How long before Petabyte pools start on this coin?
What say you?
as you said used harddrives have no resell value cause they may break at anytime and you wont want to store important data on them.
companies replace disks almost every two years cause if drives in a raid start to fail it takes about two days to rebuild the raid even if there are hot spare drives in. cold or hot spare drives are useless after 2 years even if they were never used because you dont mix old with new hardware generations in production.
finally if you have the contacts you get 2tb sata disks for less than a few bucks. all you have to do is to connect them somehow.
the energy costs to run them including the computers for 1.5 pb is less than 10th of the latest sha asics require (excluding the plot generation).
the best difference compared to sha coins is that you can mine with regular hardware and that the only asic option for this coin is for plot generation.
in long term i could imagine a 1000$ usb3 plug which generates your plots at 30mb/s and becomes useless after a couple of days when the storage is filled up ;-)
i am pretty sure we will see a gpu plot generator very soon.
i hope someone starts to port the whole coin code away from java to c. otherwise i think it gets really hard for this coin to survive in long term.