Topic: Do you think people pulling out of mining is good for Bitcoin? (Read 4666 times)

It's a bit too late now to mine without huge investments.
So yup, you're right, buy a few BTC.

Right, over half the coins are mined already. If you want an investment in BTC just buy some. If you are a believer, then they are CHEAP. The point is we need to use them to do what pankkake says.

Ask yourself, are there more or less minors since the difficulty increases due to ASICs?  Obviously less.  And this problem is likely only going to get worse, as the mining technology evolves.

It is conceivable that companies evolve creating mining rigs with no intention to sell, simply to mine for themselves. What do do you think that would do concentrating power?  It is only a matter of time before this happens.

In and ideal world, every Bitcoin user would also be a minor.  (1 computer, 1 vote).

This flaw in Bitcoin will become more and more apparent with each difficulty increase.

We need a Bitcoin fork with an innovative solution to this problem.

Difficulty can be adjusted, but it's not something that can be done on the fly. In the meantime, the network be completely frozen Anyways.... it won't happen.

Wouldn't the difficulty just adjust to it eventually?
Well in any case, I don't see this happening.

Bitcoin's value must be based on its economic utility. The big incentive is in using Bitcoin to change the world.
If we can't make a serious impact, then BTC value will drop, miners pull out, and there's a total system crash (transactions won't process if difficulty is high and miners quit hashing).

I will buy ASICs the say way I bought GPUs. I see no difference. In the end, bitcoin gets more secure - that is what matters.

Short answer is no. 

I don't get why everyone's so upset about ASIC miners.  It's naive for people to think they should be entitled to a huge profit by mining on their year-old video cards.

The progression from CPU->GPU,FPGA->ASIC seems like common sense.  It's what happens in a truly free market... progress is primarily limited by what's technically possible, not by laws & other forms of artificial regulation.

People support the ideas of a free market until they realize it means a lot more work for them since everyone needs to compete with the best.  There are no laws stopping you from developing your own ASIC chips that are better than the competition.  Extremely difficult and expensive? yes, but you won't be in trouble with the law for developing a Bitcoin miner whereas that might not hold true if you were to start printing US dollars.

I'd be worried if people didn't think Bitcoin was valuable enough to warrant the development of dedicated hardware.

What's a shiny Bitcoin? Are there dull non-shiny Bitcoins?

This.  As evident by how low ASICMiner was able to drop the price of USBMiners there is a lot of markup.  ASICMiner simply sold them that high because well everyone else tripped over their dick and left ASICMiner with no significant competition.  BFL jumping the gun and promising ASICs about a year before it was feasible started this whole staggered start run multi-year pre-order bonanza.  In time though the network will sort it out.  

There will be raw ASIC chips made by at least 3-4 manufacturers (not all of them are going to make it, but at least some will).  I also think eventually most chip builders will take the route that Avalon (and yes AMD) have done and not offer complete miners for sell, instead getting out of the retail business and selling chips to OEMs (yeah that "AMD video card isn't made or sold by AMD, just the chip is").  Which means you probably will see at least a dozen mining OEMs all of the world making end units in a variety of sizes and price points.  


The margins will shrink (probably go negative for a while) and Bitcoin will reflect the relatively boring, low margin commodity business that it is.  The risk takers and speculators will move on to the next shiny and a large number of miners will grind out a small (very small) profit between their capital costs plus electrical costs and the the coins minted.  Many will probably see it not as a way to get rich but as an indirect way to buy Bitcoins in a decentralized fashion.  Input so many hours, plus so much computing power plus so much burnt electricity and out pops a shiny Bitcoin.  

You have Asicminer Block Eruptors, and you will have K1 1-Avalon-Chip mini USB miners. These will be sold in the tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands. Then there will be at least a dozen more asic hardware companies coming out with next gen mining equipment.

We will have maybe just as many individual miners, distributed more or less all over the globe.

Some will be in it for profit. Then move on to bigger or faster miners. (Or smaller miners that do more.)
Some will be in it for the lulz. Just because. Or maybe curious.
Some will be in it to actually secure the network.

All of them will secure the network.

Why are there distributed computing projects for finding aliens, prime numbers, cracking codes, folding proteins, solving math problems like pi or chess, rendering 3D images, predicting climates, modeling the universe, looking at genes or DNA, detecting earthquakes, monitoring radioactivity, and finding Golumb rulers? Do any of those make money for the ones running the clients?

Almost NONE. Some have cash prizes. Almost all of them have leaderboards for most processing power, both individually and in teams, so the competition is for the highest number or score, almost like a game.

Bitcoin mining has the side effect (or main effect) of creating something of value.

But they are selling the ASICs to the hands of many.  They can make more money selling to rubes than mining, and there goes your central distribution theory.

The more minors the better.

If there is a flaw in Bitcoin ASICS have exposed it... concentrating too much control in too few hands.

Someone needs to create a Bitcoin fork that solves this problem... insuring mining stays widely distributed over as many users as possible.

Yes, but even if you have free hardware and free electricity, you are still an idiot for GPU mining Bitcoin.

You can Scrypt mine on middlecoin.com and make a much better return.

If you have free hardware and free electricity, it can certainly work.  Most people entering mining are not good at actually accounting for if its a good idea, and plenty of people have been "lucky" through price increases to be bailed out on that decision.  I do spend very little time worrying about the miners, but it gives me a little bit of joy inside seeing people who thought they could get rich quick getting crushed.

I'm about the same.  I'm almost done trying to tell people that they are stupid for using GPUs on Bitcoin mining. 

Some people just can't read or something.  Anyone in a Bitcoin mining pool with a GPU is ignorant.  It's as simple as that!

Na, still zero fucks given about whether they are profitable or lose their ass.

That sounds much better than "I give zero fucks"

Sounds like you give a few fucks, or at least an iota of a single fuck.  If you truely gave no fucks, then you wouldn't have felt the need to say so... FUCK.

No need to be tough, just don't see why the survivor of GPU miners is important at all.  The GPU whiners are like the bloated labor unions whining that labor is going to China.  Oh so sad, you can't compete.  Go mine LTC or buy ASICs.