Most people will not be miners. Anyone who had a belief that the Bitcoin network would someday have billions of miners was simply delusional. Reality is crashing into that delusion and that is why we get threads like this.
Decentralized doesn't require 100% of users to mine Bitcoin. The reality is today many people
The idea that mining = Bitcoin is simply a delusion.
Now Bitcoin does need to be decentralized. It would be optimal to have four or five companies producing hardware competing on cost, efficiency, features, etc. We aren't there yet. BFL shares a lot of the blame for that. They simply weren't ready in 2012 (lolz it is funny how not ready they were) to make the kind of promises they did. That accelerated the time table. People stopped working on FPGA and rushed ASIC plans. Had BFL been even slightly more realistic about ASIC products the transistion would be be a little less rushed. All that is water under the bridge though.
In time KnC, ASICMiner, BFL, Avalon, etc will all have sufficient capacity to have reasonable delivery timeframes. New players will emerge, better tech will be developed, life will go on. Not everyone will be a miner. I was forced out of mining because of a lack of time and in hindsight it was the great. Someday I will buy an ASIC rig, probably a small one (whatever that means in future hashing power) and just let it mine on p2pool. It won't be a way to get rich, it won't be a hope that $1,000 in gear will someday make me a billionaire. As long as it can break even and convert electricity into coins I will be happy. I probably am not alone in that respect. A lot of people have small realistic goals. Thousands of people with modest amounts of hashing power will secure the network. Now if you WANT to be a professional miner well the days of just buying 20 GPU from NewEgg and making a fortune are over (if they ever existed) it is going to require real capital, real resources, real commitment. So those at that fork in the read think about what you want to do and be realistic about it.
