Are you sure that merge mining doesn't slow your rig down at all, not even increasing electric consumption?
It doesn't - you produce the same amount of hashes, which are sent to the pool server, which then checks them against different coins. So basically the pool server does more work, not you.
That is the best news one can get for buying these expensive and elusive ASICS.
I predict there will be dozens of merge mined coins next year. If you get enough ASICS now you can stand to make a killing. It's a big risk but so is the potential.
I admire your pesimism
I believe that no coin that can be merge-mined will ever increase in value, because of the fact it is merged mined.
Back when merge-mining was first introduced for Namecoin I myself and other people believed that this might somehow make NMC increase in value - it didn't.
And it make sense, because mining have no correlation to the value of a coin. Its value is derived from simple market forces - interest to buy and interest to sell
How am I pessimistic? I feel I'm being optimistic. Unless you're referring to the fact latecomers will never make any real money. This is true for any new industry - this is reality, not everybody can get rich in this universe, not now not ever.
And I wasn't implying that merge mining would cause any coin to spike in value. I was referring to market forces such as raised awareness, a spike in demand, a Bitcoin ETF, a spike in market participants, a spike in speculative investors, a spike in institutional investors, etc.
And this did happen to Namecoin - where it was trading at $.001 earlier this year and in April when Bitcoin spiked Namecoin went up 100,000%, from $.001 to $1. For a while it was actually over $1.
And we are still at max 1% population active rate. A Bitcoin ETF alone could spike that to 10% in under 12 months. The media, govt and banks can then take the participation rate to at least 40% and they can do it faster than the Internet funds adoption from 1994 to 2000.
This thing (alt-coins) is rigged to go sky-high, the right pieces and market participants just need to fall into place and if you've got your investments ready to go just sit back and watch the show.