Topic: ASICS, difficulty and price? (Read 743 times)

No.  Why would it?  I keep seeing people making the claim that LTC (and by extension other scrypt coins) will see a value increase from the difficulty increase but why would they? 

There is much wisdom to be found about the future of mining but who can really know what will happen a month, 3 months, a year from now?

One thing's for sure and that ASICs are here but what does that actually mean in real terms? They have been around for a while now from the lowly GS Dual and then its big brother the G-Blade and so on...

With the the GS Dual doing 0.36 m/hs at 5w (fanless on scrypt) and the Blade doing 5.2 m/hs at 140w, then on to 30, 60, 90 m/hs all at under 1KW, will we just see a gradual, or not so gradual, 'switching off' of GPU rigs and their m'hash being replaced by ASIC hashing? Can miners with a dozen or so rigs afford to replace these with the equivalent or more in ASICs at 'new' pricing? I just don't know. Will GPU miners keep there rigs running at a loss in the hope of a BTC and associated LTC / ALTcoin bubble?

We could face a cataclysmic decline in BTC et al following who knows what 'event' and ensuing media FUD such as the MTGox fiasco; similarly, we could face an ecstatic event such as rapid wider acceptance of BTC creating brisk buying doubling its value again...

I'm now definitely looking to turn off power hungry GPUs and make some hard decisions. Do we have enough faith in the future of Cryptocurrency in general terms to convince ourselves to invest further?

Quite frankly, right at this point, I do not know! Apologies for the 'lack of an answer' but just sharing my thoughts...

EDITED:

As a footnote; look at the switching multipools with drastically reduced hashrates - bet your bottom dollar the big boys at the top on ASICS are still there, with the Hash reduction down in the 10 - 50 m/hs region...

THIS.

yeah a common misconception, you will just lose money in the long run due to the fact that you need to buy the next gen asic to stay in the game

leave that shitty race out, stay with gpu and try to instamine some coins, more profit in this way guaranteed

No.

^Exactly, if only El_dude and few other clowns would understand this.

No, like bitcoin, you will just lose more and more money mining from now on. The value of ltc has absolutely no reason to rise as mining doesn't drive price; perceived value from it being used in an economy is what drives price but most people seem to not know/forget/ignore/pretend that's not the case.

Well the big ASICS are here, and from a reliable company.
http://affiliate.gawminers.com//idevaffiliate.php?id=105

Obviously the difficulty of litecoin (and all scrypt coins) is
going to go way up.  So my question to the veterans of
the bitcoin ASIC race is, Will the price of LTC go up with
the difficulty? And is this always the case?  I am trying
to decide whether it is smarter to just buy a lot of LTC,
figuring it will go up due to ASICS, or if I should actually
buy the ASIC?