So it's pretty individualized. I would not say it served no purpose as I think it's efficiency did serve one but it is perhaps did the most for those with higher electricity prices. As that is where it is harder and harder to mine.
With the current difficulty, if your electricity is $0.1, the mining revenue is double the electricity price. When the halving come, there will be no profit.
Having is still a LONG time away in mining terms though. And we talk about having as some big thing... but if you look at data since January 13th ... we have almost haved just look at data:
Feb 19 2016 163,491,654,909 13.44% 1,170,318,852 GH/s
Feb 07 2016 144,116,447,847 20.06% 1,031,625,717 GH/s
Jan 26 2016 120,033,340,651 5.89% 859,232,121 GH/s
Jan 13 2016 113,354,299,801 9.12% 811,421,684 GH/s
total 48.51%
So we make it sound like this big horrible thing but we did it in a month and a half in difficulty changes.