You better mine as much ETH as you can, because come July your profits are going to drop ridiculously as the new Bitmain ETH ASICs start shipping. I believe the first batch ships around May 5th but thanks to the last ETH devs conference, where they pretty much said screw the individual GPU miner by going against the public outcry asking for a simple fork to make current ASIC's useless and in turn would instantly drop the ETH difficulty by probably more than half.
Bitmain has a second large shipment going out in July. And this shipment is the one that will hurt the difficulty. There is no doubt in my mind that Bitmain has been ASIC farming ETH since December. If you don't believe me bring up any ETH difficulty cart and look how steady the ETH hash has gone up since December. That steady of a rise is impossible unless you command the majority of the hash power. Then look how there are three large spikes where the ETH difficulty and hash dropped by almost half for about a hour or two, just to jump back up exactly where it was (50TH down then back up), and soon the pattern continues of steadily growing the hash by 2TH a day or 2 until about late feb. I would not be surprised to find out the three dips were Bitmain's farm shutting down for upgrades or maintenance and then powering back up.
We will never know just how much of the total network hash power Bitmain has until the ETH devs get their heads out of their ass and fork the coin. The main dev that would be in charge of doing the fork stated in the dev conference (which I was tuned into live) "it would be simple to do". I still don't understand (and it was never properly explained), why his peers shut him down and ignored the conference chat where more than 80% of the attendees were asking for the fork.
If ETH forks the algo and nothing changes, worst case I eat crow and get proven wrong and like minded people like myself can move forward knowing the truth. But if I am right, that could mean an instant 50% in ETH mining rewards across the board for everyone mining with GPUs.
That's just my thoughts on the issue. I have no problem with ASIC's as I have a bunch in my farm. My problem is with a company that mines for months secretly and then once they develop a new more powerful ASIC they then have the intestinal fortitude to turn around and take those old miners out of their farms and sell them as new to the public in order to both make a very large profit on the sale of the used miners, and at the same time have a mask for the newer more powerful ASIC's they replaced the old ones with in their farm.
Since they have already been mining with the old ones the large rise in diff and hash on the net will not be coming from the ASIC's they sold to the public like they hope everyone will be stupid enough to believe, but by the newer more powerful ones they will start using which will probably go on sale later this year or as soon as ETH is no longer mineable. Doesn't sound too decentralized to me. Again that's just my 2 cents on the matter. Happy mining
Great insight, but ethereum will be POS so we have a limited time left
Sadly from the last dev conference, I would not hold my breath on seeing that happen anytime soon.