"Only in the crypto world is an ROI in under a year for equipment "too long."
Yeah...theres a good reason for that
Anyways once everyone gets their 5000 BCUs then good luck with the difficulty on the coins. At least they will have some more mainstream algos because all the small ones will have their profit reduced to rubble in the end.
A huge part of that logic is the fact that technology advances so fast. Making ROI very difficult for older architectures/nm processes. Look at the antminer D3, many people bought at the wrong time and never ROIed since the tech train never stops moving.
Look at the Baikal Giant N for example. They were selling them each for 3800USD in the first couple weeks. A boat load of people bought when all the CryptoNight ASICs were being launched and will never ROI (not even close). They are selling for 200-400USD now 3 months later since the networkhash went up 10X on certain coins.
I highly doubt FPGAs are the future of mining. There's a reason it hasn't been so for the past decade. I do however think FPGAs are in a pretty good spot as of today (we are in the middle of a transition point from GPU to ASIC) but once coins stop forking against ASICs (ASICs are the inevitable future) will be the end of FPGAs. I personally don't see the hype behind it, if anything the bitstream devs are going to be the real winners here.
Look at the top 20 coins today compared to 2 years ago.. Almost every single one that is mineable is an ASIC algo. A couple years ago it was about half and half. ASICs are clearly taking over. I think FPGAs will shine for a short lived while.
If asics are the inevitable future of all mining and asic builders flood all coins with endless gear mining dies.
So your prediction above is bleak.
If FPGA gain hold and build out crushing all coins mining dies.
Thinking that gpus get pushed to the curb completely is the same as thinking mining will die.
Monero development team. Will be forking again. Thank god at least one development team understands that gpu mining is essential for overall crypto business to survive.
This does not mean all mining needs to be gpu.
It means some mining needs to be gpu.
This is simple economics .
It also means some coins should be FPGA
And some need to be asic.
Most of the worlds society’s have bicycles motorcycles cars and trucks
All have a purpose to move people and things.
Tossing out gpu Mining will break this system much the same that tossing bicycles out would hurt society.
So far BTG and Monero did forks
And now monero is doing a second fork.
We need this to encourage gpus to mine.