Apologies for wall of text and ramblings.
Great responses! And something to mull over. You guys have been in this game longer than me so it's great to hear your thoughts. I'm just trying to grasp why a large company wouldn't just buy/create a large GPU farm. These guys have millions if not tens of millions to spend, and I don't think the issue of ASIC vs GPU would come up except for power consumption. That becomes a moot point too when you find out they have a 200KW solar/wind/thermal farm running everything as well. I'm not saying that's what will happen but if I can think of this I'm sure they can to? Although I think there is a coin technology being developed to normalize hashrates in a progressive way from the cpu miners all the way to the big farms.
I'm looking at the A2 22nm chip ASICs that Gridseed will be shipping sometime in June. The GSD Blades (~5-6MHs) are down to a grand but I'm skipping on these and the 55nm ASICs that Hashra have started taking orders for. I'll have to double check on the Hashra chip size. I feel a bit bad for the folks who pre-ordered with KnC. That thread has turned into a clusterfuck, sorry I can't think of a better term.
i got into mining wanting to mine LTC, but in the end, ie the same day, I just started mining on scryptguild and that converted everything to BTC. It's such a quagmire. Do i mine for the ideology? Do I mine for pure profit? A few weeks later I opted to buy the mini gridseeds and put the GPU machines on VTC and haven't looked back since.
I get the whole notion of decentralised GPU mining, or at least I think I do, and it strengthening the network by numbers, but who are these miners? The ones that lucked out being born in a prosperous part of the world? I would love South America, and Africa really dialling into this space but they won't be coming in as miners. Taxes on electronic good into Africa and South America are sometimes at 100% or greater. These guys will be mostly coming in as consumers using ltc, btc, vtc, or whatever other coin that's on the market. Simple transactions over cell phones and the feel good factor about having control over their money; demand for scrypt, scrypt-n, and sha256 will increase in that sense. The mining tables have turned. They are now the consumers, billions of them, and the technologically advanced countries are the miners. Also people are weird. A person looks at BTC and thinks that's a lot, now I'm dealing in .00334 numbers. They look at LTC and think hey that's a more manageable number in their heads, and so on. Big purchases? Use BTC, everyday purchases use LTC/VTC. Over time I've noticed that what techies think is the right thing the consumers tend to think the opposite :/
To be fair I look at the ROI argument and in my head I square it off the same way as property prices in hot spots like central London, New York, or even the few square miles in Toronto. It's kind of similar in the sense that there is no more place to build but for some unfortunate reason everyone wants to live there, or can't leave. The point is the desirable land is finite, much like BTC/LTC/VTC is finite. Once the technology has reached a plateau, the ROI in a market that's desirable will always be greater than it's growth, you just need to stay in the game. That's a bold statement, but you can look it up. Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty looks a fascinating read if you're interested in economics and has some great insights into this and other cool economics stuff.
I don't think cryptocurrency is there yet because the technology hasn't started levelling off. It's still in a dog eat dog phase. It's nuts that the GBlade was 2000 dollars 2 weeks ago, then 1500 dollars a week ago, and now 1000 dollars. ASIC producers were claiming 50MHs for $10K, then 75 MHs, then 100+ all in one day. 22nm die size is pretty much where we are globally as well. 14nm is still a ways away for everyone except intel. And even they are delaying the die shrink.
I would suggest that if you're going to invest long term into mining from an ideological sense you should put 50% or 25% of your next purchase into solar or wind. If you're in it for pure profit then you probably play the markets and need be able to make enough per day to move on that same day. But what if you don't have space for solar or wind? Well now you know what South Americans and Africans feel like when they can't even mine, but at least you have the option to move to a more rural area and do your thing there. What's the ROI if your electricity is almost free? It doesn't matter anymore, you now have a basic income. Sure it will go down as difficulty ramps up but if you stay in the game you're really getting the taste of freedom. Money, electricity, heck even water from rain collection. Something something chasing rainbows right?
So now you have your 2 boxes producing 250+MHs scrypt using 2500W of power. You have a 5KW renewable energy source, wow VTC is going places. I stick my 250MHs on a pool that converts scrypt to VTC. This is now the equivalent of 125MHs at 2500W. Using the most efficient hash/power GPU, ie 750Ti, let's do a calculation:
1.8MHs at 450W. But wait it's scrypt-n so 900Khs at 225W. 2500W will give you about 10MHs on pure VTC. You'd be getting 12 times more return from mining scrypt and exchanging to VTC from a power perspective. These numbers don't seem right so please chime in and tell me where this went wrong.
I was going to sell my GPUs a week or so ago but the sidechain news that Vertcoin implemented piqued my interest, so I'm holding on to see how it pans out over the next 2 months.
The cryptocurrrency community hasn't had a taste of real demand yet, not even a whiff to be fair. Only investors and short term profit makers have put the price where it is, and coders/techies on the bleeding edge of mining software take advantage of new algos becoming bag holders; much to the joy of the ideologists because the genie is out of the bottle. Once mindshare reaches a tipping point, and the barriers of entry become trivial I don't see why there won't be a demand for absolutely everything in this space, BTC/LTC/VTC included.
thanks for pointing out my mistake. 
