Well,CPU's were used to mine first,then came GPU's.I'm sure there were some people who said this was a bad thing.
Then FPGA's started doing the same thing,making GPU's obsolete.Of course it would take quite awhile before they are not worth using,i.e. diff going up becuase of FPGA's.
Now ASIC's are really going put a hurt to those using GPU's,which are what the majority of miners are using.
I think this is where the arguments are coming from,with all the investments in GPU farms going to be worthless before years end.Thats alot of money & time invested going to waste.
It's a shame,but it's called progress................I believe the diff will go up,but as GPU farms start shutting down the diff will level off,where? I have no idea.......
I've been reading this word for word up until recently as it exploded in comments. Speculation about how the SC will turn out is only that, can be nothing more, and until we receive updates I'll make this one post and let people rant on their own merry ways.
The main issue that I see with ASICs is that it is a contradiction in the expansion of the acceptance of bitcoin. Personally, I already think that bitcoin is limited by its complexity and will never be generally accepted. If you are not a miner you are simply looking to use bitcoin to save yourself money on purchasing an item or items. You accept that the added difficulty of acquiring bitcoins to pay for an item will be worth it if it offsets the cost of the item to a a degree you see acceptable. To you the bitcoin market should always balance itself out and the difficulty, added average hashrate, etc... will matter very little to you.
For those of us who mine or have a sizeable investment in current technology, very simply ASICs present a threat that our current equipment will cease to be valuable outside of it's resale value. If many people see their large investments go down the drain will they buy into more technology or will they simply fold and accept their losses? Personally, I have about a 55% investment in GPUs and 45% in FPGAs, but the reality of knowing that I could have flushed about $6k down the drain hit me a little hard. At this point I have burnt through the amount of money I have personally deamed acceptable to invest. If ASICs tank the efficiency of GPUs and FPGAs I will ride my rigs out until they are no longer profitable, sell the rest off accepting a loss, learn something from it.
I believe that many others will go the same way. The mass amount of ATI GPUs already in existance and in people's homes made setting up a mining rig somewhat simple. When, those are no longer profitable do you think people will buy into technology that they have no clue about to continue mining? Setting up a single mining computer in your home with something you already own, hoping to make back some of your investment is completely different then going out to purchase hashing power and hoping you break even at somewhere down the line. At this point in time with the way the market is going and with the reward halving coming up if you are a small time miner I see mining under normal circumstances (ie: pays for power, deals with the added heat, has a normal job) dying off. The rapid expansion of mining companies on GBLSE and increase of technology will eventually kill the ability of your average every day miner to continue to be profitable.
If we want bitcoin to expand and succeed it needs to do so on the backs of generally accepted technology that everyone has access to. One company producing an item that can instantly change the game is the exact opposite of what we need. Bitcoin only has value because we accept it as having value. What happens when bitcoin tanks because 99% of it's previous users can no longer keep up? Do one percent of the large miners become one hundred percent? What happens then, when the value of BTC tanks down to next to nothing? How will you feel when you flushed $1M down the drain?