WalterMagnum: WalterMagnum: I would imagine most folks who are against ASICs are GPU miners. I wish we could have this discussion without miners being involved. I own a GPU farm, but I know ASICs are inevitable and healthy for the space in the long term.

I chose not to be ASIC miner from the beginning because I did not see any real competition in terms of manufacturing ASICs so I expected monopoly misuse and highly unfair distribution which we see in bitcoin. I am not idealistic but having a coin evenly distributed will mean no one can control or manipulate its value.

Also good to note that monopoly will always means misuse. Let me give you some examples on how bitmain are misbehaving.

They made Ant bleed, they injected a functionality in their ASICs to be able to track them and shutdown them whenever they need. They can shutdown most of bitcoin miners with this feature (virus) they injected. It is very astonishing that how people are still willing to buy their ASICs after such a scandal.

https://www.antbleed.com/ ASIC boost, they made use of a bug in bitcoin mining algorithm to make their miners 20% faster and they highly opposed bitcoin fork to eliminate this bug because it would hurt their miners supremacy.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/asicboost-exploit-claims-put-bitmain-in-hot-water

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/breaking-down-bitcoins-asicboost-scandal/ Least but not last, they manufacture and run their ASICs secretly and dump them when they are not profitable. (monero is shining example)

So at current situation I do not get the point how ASICs are good for healthy network at all. Moreover they are prohibited on many third world countries plus they are extremely limited commodity for example when S9 was profitable it was out of stock most of the time and it was being reselled for four times of its original price.

So until I see that ASICs are available every where and with good competition I will never step in. Even getting more ASIC means that I will be out of the whole market because I do not trust investing on a coin highly controlled by shady manufacturers like bitmain.