Topic: ASICS killing BTC ? - page 6. (Read 15908 times)

They will.  Difficulty will keep rising until the ROI% over capital and electricity is low.  The block subsidy will not change until block 420,000 when it drops to 12.5 BTC.

they're raping the original intentions behind it

but they do not rape bitcoin bitcoin still works

The companies which build the ASIC's are killing bitcoin. Look at BFL for example. They are using everyone's 'pre-order' money to build their own machines and then rape bitcoin themselves, only shipping when the difficulty goes too high.

The golden rule of Bitcoin is do not change the block reward structure Satoshi originally setup.   Changes in protocol,upgrades and tweeks are fine but not to deviate from the original Satoshi money supply. 

These asics are not interested in breaking bitcoin themselves, so if they mine, they will try to distribute their hashing speed on ifferent pools and etc. Otherwise they will LOSE IT ALL too.

Bitcoin will survive and have stable network doing those calculations. It's only that mining for simple basement dwellers becomes dead. And opportunistic fiat flowing into bitcoin slows down, lowering the price at that.

Only thing I would like to see - lesser reward for block in next 4 months, so those asics don't get to print too much money daily. They should be awarded with ~25% over their electricity and maintenance costs, not more.

No we are all fine.

Do you think, in that case, LTC could be percieved as a viable long term investment?

Sorry I should have been more precise and said speculators rather then customers, I call people who spend coins users and BTC indeed still has a larger user base, but because prices in the BTC economy are in USD the user base has no net effect on valuation.  The pool of people who buy coins from exchanges for purposes of speculation (allong with miners) are the ones that set a coins valuation and they can very easily move to a different coin, just about anyone who speculates in BTC would be willing and able to buy LTC as they already have all the skills & knowledge necessary to do so, much like a customer for one car is potentially a customer for any other.  Because ALL coins value is almost entirely speculative right now the degree of penetration with merchants is not really relevant to valuation in my view.

How do you figure? Bitcoin customers include those who use BitPay with all their businesses, and Gyft with all their businesses, among others. I don't know of many Litecoin customers aside from Thepiratebay and their donors.

I really appreciate you being here

Kaminsky's prediction can come to pass by LTC simply superseding BTC as the dominant coin, and that is in fact the most likely scenario for that to happen due to resistance of BTC developers and BTC miners to consider any change in hash protocol.

Personally I believe the current dynamic we are seeing in the BTC price decline has nothing to do with government regulation, Gox or ASICs, its just the final stage of the deflation of the bubble and it will bottom out in the $10 to $30 range following a curve much like that after July 2011.  But unlike 2011 BTC now has a competitor that is showing independent and stable valuation, that presents a huge risk that BTC won't rebound in value as people have other coins to put their money in.

Now you might argue that their are all these SHA dedicated ASICs in existence now that can't move into LTC so they will just keep mining BTC and all those ASICS have sooooo many more hashes and are more 'secure' then LTC.  This is correct on the surface but irrelevant, coins derive their exchange value from the number of USD that people are offering for the coins divided by the number of coins offered for sale, past expenditure of 'Work' are irrelevant.  If the number of dollars that want LTC exceeds the dollars that want BTC then LTC will be worth more and will be the 'growth' coin.

Already total LTC mining revenue is 27% of BTCs, and if LTC maintains it's current price and BTC declines to the $20 point then the two coins would be at equal mining revenue.  If we see any kind of significant increase in LTC value following the highly anticipated (and hyped) inclusion of it on Gox then the cross over can occur with very little further decline in BTC valuation.  Their is also likely a zero-sum game here too, the customer base for BTC and LTC are nearly identical and it's likely that their is a limited pool of dollars and that a boom in one coin will always result in a slump in others.  A very large boom in LTC could cause such a drying up of dollars offered for BTC that it collapses down to levels that are effectively fatal as they will permanently remove the perception of BTC as a viable long term investment.

Like i said before asics will be available at 1/10th the original retail price... that is the point at which asic ppl will give up and the long term visionaries who are not there to make a quick buck stick around and wreap the real profits as btc will become viable as a long term investment. At that point im not sure what the ground will be on btc could be $10 or $50.. but looking at the asic community for the fear index denoted in cost to buy an asic.

Everyone buy an ASIC - so it won't break Bitcoin - same way as GPU/FPGA-Hashing appeared...

Nope.  If ASICminer was not mining they would be, but for each USB stick you buy from them, they can add many times that in hashing power to their own farm.  At BEST you are just allowing them to place more hashing power online without taking 51%, at worst the majority of the network.

The difficulty will increase also if hash power increase. So, I don't think ASICS will be able to kill BTC.

The whole Asic & ltc thing is nothing more than that http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=768h3Tz4Qik

OP makes valid points.

However I think (well at least hope) that more ASIC manufacturers will emerge and competition will increase.

man oh man, who saw this coming?

oh yeah, anyone with a fucking clue

when everyone is out to make a quick buck the money slows down eventually

As ASICs are produced, whether they are shipped to purchasers or used by the companies that took pre-payment, or made/used by any other third party the overall hashrate of BTC climbs. This means the difficulty climbs, and the profitability per GH drops over time.

For any ASIC x that can mine y GH/s there is some point z in the future where it would no longer be profitable to buy it at price p . If I order an ASIC for price p now, I don't know when I get it will be before or after z. This is a problem and why I have not ordered one and instead got a GPU and mine LTC instead.

People already involved in BTC for years need to understand the attitude of new users, they have no huge loyalty to BTC over LTC or any other crypto. They are not in any GAME yet so they don't care about any coin, they learn about them, then decide which to get involved in. It's dangerous to think a newbie will take a risk on an ASIC pre-order over hardware that they can buy today, or already have to mine a scrypt coin immediately purely because of the momentum BTC already has.

Such situation over time may cause BTC community to shrink and the LTC or some other alt coin community to grow, and perhaps some day overtake it. I think it's arrogant and BTC-biased to think this is not possible.