The ASIC hash rate war is proving to be a drama. What I see happening is the ASIC vendors released their units with two much hash power, this will cost them sales and profits in the near future with BFL being the worst offender.
Instead of introducing the TH/s to the network spread around to thousands of miners in small chunks, they told everyone about the Minirig. People with deep pockets have ordered hundreds so when they finally ship, the TH/s will explode overnight. This will drive the smaller miners away from BTC and buying BFL product as the smaller units wont be able to compete, and the average miner wont be able to afford competitive rigs any longer, the gap is too large. So the mining will be concentrated into a smaller and smaller group of players with deep pockets. They will be able to dominate at a far cheaper cost than otherwise would have been possible for two reasons. Firstly BFL sold the Minirig too cheap, per GH/s compared to all other products on the market including their own lesser models. Secondly the instant concentration of hashing power will reduce the other miners revenue far more abruptly than if the whole net rose gradually, that will cause shock and awe not unlike a market crash.
Of course BFL are not alone, the Avalon 66GH/s unit was too big, they should have started with a 22 GH/s unit or smaller, and shipped 3 times as many of them.
Kncminer are talking about a 175GH/s an 350GH/s which are once again too much hash power.
Up until now everyone added hashing power in small increments adding a GPU or two, the crazies built racks of the things, but overall there were no big jumps. That's all about to change and I think for the worse. BTC was all about decentralization, these unnecessarily large ASIC sizes that are coming, screws up that concept.
However BFL has yet to ship a damn thing from the revised BitForce line. The Jalepenos are old news, and it took over a year for them just to deliver that much. I feel the BFL rigs are not of any concern until someone actually sees one in the wild, which at present rate will be sometime in 2014...
KnCMiner is bull, as Phinneaus Gage has been happy to point out the many holes in them so far. They have only created an FPGA miner prototype (which looks more like 4 FPGA boards loosely bolted together with small corner pieces of acrylic plastic...not what I would call a real prototype), which was then dumped because FPGA won't do anything against ASICs. Now they claim to be developing that, but have so far produced absolutely nothing. I have no faith the will as they seem just as disorganized and/or scammy as the rest.
The network will even out some, as the big players jump into ASIC the FPGA and GPU miners will either shift in or go to Litecoin or other coins. I don't think the jump will be as bad or as fast as most predict, but it will be increasing a lot as ASICs are rolled out by other companies like ASICMiner and Avalon who have actually delivered what they promised. But even as mining gets harder, the other edge of that sword is that Bitcoin will continue to increase in value because of it. Even mining a small slice of a coin can still mean big money in the future.
It's going to be very hard soon to mine anything.
how come? someone announce ASIC-scrypt miners?
Scrypt is just now hitting the FPGA stage, as I know
Scrypt is not as apt on ASIC hardware either, it will be a long time before we see Gen 4 hardware for Scrypt coins.