I've been reading a lot on these miners that companies are releasing, essential killing GPU mining for the average joe.
It's sad to see.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=4fwAseQoUCs this video shows the butterfly labs selling a 60ghz miner for $1300.
Is this the future of bitcoin? Will you HAVE to have a custom built miner soon?
It's not dead yet unless your trying to do it all by yourself. None of these buttwerfly lab miners haven't been seen in the wild yet so until they are on the market then bitcoing minign with GPU's isn't dead.
Honestly with those miners, if they produce as much as they promise to, people will just keep on producing Bitcoins, selling them, buying more miners. and repeating, making tremendous amounts of money. That's when someone has to step in and stop the process.
Bitcoin would crash before that happens.
The butterfly Miner's are most likely a scam, but if it isn't the diffuculty would go up by a bunch and we would all have to use ASIC from butterfly or avalon.
Are you saying it would crash simply because the only miners of bitcoins will be people or spend 1300 dollars on a unuseable computer other then bitcoing mining?
i like the idea of a prebuilt bitcoin minning machine like an asic, but i think it should be limited to a baisic model that can get the equivelent of 4 7970's at most in hash's. for reason's and more like what you guy's have mentioned above. it should be about efficiency not massive overkill specialised compute. to keep bitcoin viable to the masses these machine's need to be kept limited in compute but that wont happen....