But even when you embrace ASICs, you are constantly buying more.
Today you swap from your GPU to 20 MH/s to get some coins
Next month you have to ditch the 20 MH/s to get 150 MH/s
The next month you ditch the 150 MH/s to get 450 MH/s
The cycle never ends and you are constantly having to invest in faster hardware just to keep earning the same coins you did in the past. At some point you're spending more on hardware purchases than you're getting back.
yeah but far lower power consumption means you can run ASICs for a lot longer before your money runs out from paying the bills.. you're really just trading the Versatility of the GPU for the Longevity of the ASIC.
with the GPU, if a new coin comes out you can mine it straight away... with an ASIC your pretty much limited on what coins you can mine.
I have a BFL 30GH thats been mining for about 6 months... its still going and I did get my money back and then some at least.. its mining Maza coins now but it really only brings in a few dollars a day nowdays and costs a bit less than that to run.
whether you mine ASICs, GPUs or trade or just work to get coins, there are pluses and huge pitfalls with each strategy... so I try to do a little of each just in case one of them hits the bigtime.
litecoin was unprofitable to mine with GPUs for about 6 months before it exploded... would it have been a good idea to buy litecoins or mine them before the price exploded, even though it was unprofitable at the time?.... absolutely... will that ever happen again? who knows... chances are that if bitcoin explodes again then it will take many coins with it... all we can do is wait and see... and build cryptocoin communities and infrastructure in the meantime..
I've learnt a lot of over these past few years and one thing I am sure of is that the knowledge I have gained is priceless. So even if you lose some money.. you really aren't losing at all because you are miles ahead of most of the rest of the world....
I guess really it's two ways of looking at it. You can look at it as being that this progression is worthless or a great thing. I think it's worthless because:
If there are 10 miners and each has 5 GH/s, burning $1 a day (including hardware, electric, wear and tear, etc.), the network is 50 GH/s.
If we bring up ASICs now everyone has 100 GH/s, burning $1.50 a day (including all), the network has 1000 GH/s.
But what has been accomplished? Everyone gets the same number of coins and the network is NOT any more secure than it was prior, since each person has the same relative hash rate.
The entire system is pushed by greed and racing to be faster than anyone else.