I think it would be fair if everyone hashed on CPUs and GPUs instead of ASICs. Bitcoin should have been ASIC resistant, or the network should have a cap on the maximum number of Bitcoins an induvidual miner can mine or something. What do you guys think?
There seems to be a naive view among some posters that mining should be profitable for someone mining in their spare room or on their PC. This was never the intention of the bitcoin developers.
From Satoshi on
Development & Technical Discussion > Post reply ( Re: Scalability and transaction rate )
The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale. That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server. The design supports letting users just be users. The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be. Those few nodes will be big server farms. The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions and don't generate.
People need to remember Bitcoin was created to provide a way of moving electronic cash without needing to go through a trusted third party, for example a bank. Mining is not the reason cryptocurrencies exist.
Mining is simply part of making cryptocurrencies possible. Mining is mainly done in large mining farms using specialist hardware not available to the general public. Just be thankful that there is still one miner manufacturer (Bitmain) selling an admittedly marginal miner to the general pubic.
