A fitting perspective to begin the New Year is to determine whether non-mining related activities are enough to sustain cryptocurrency-based economies and assuming it could be said that any cryptocurrency enthusiast worth their salt must have mined something determine a reasonable level of personal mining activity. With bitcoin mining relegated to operators of ASIC-based hash-farms such as this one in Iceland or this one in Hong Kong the comparatively under-developed scrypt-based mining field represents an enticing opportunity provided a low-power alternative to power-hungry GPU mining could be achieved. Could an adaption of the ASIC implementation that amped-up global bitcoin hashing while relegating GPU unuseable for mining bitcoin be achieved for GPU-centric scrypt-based mining? If Alpha Technology delivers on their promise of ASIC-based script miners that answer is an unequivocal Yes. In-fact the exciting part is that Alpha has entered into the pre-order phase of selling batch 1 of their 5M and 25M ASIC-based scrypt miners that utilizes 1/10 the power of GPU-based miners.
An alternative approach to personal mining as a means to acquiring cryptocoins is direct investment with each side having it’s advantages. As aptly stated in this bitcointalk reply to the mine vs invest discussion “It depends what is your interest, the money or the technology – trade to make some money, mine to learn about the technology.” While there appears to be a window of opportunity to leverage low-power ASIC scrypt miners, even with one-tenth the power foot-print as was previously determined in this litecoin mining assessment a key variable to cryptocoin mining profitability is operating at a reasonable and predictable difficulty level where 5% or greater seriously hampers the return on investment of even the most energy efficient mining rig negating the miner’s ability to pay for itself. In other words difficulty driven by demand could conceivably outpace any personal solo-mining rig.
While the opportunity to be one of the first to roll-out an ASIC-powered scrypt miner is enticing, an alternate use of those resources in energy and bitcoin could be utilized in sizing-up the players, psychology and best-practices for operating within the cryptocurrency marketplace while directly acquiring through investment digital currency tied to projects and communities that have the best change of suceeding. Not to say that a mining discovery is not in the cards, in-fact a controversial new alternate currency called Quark presents a retro-opportunity to mine using good old CPU prompting this detailed video recipe for establishing a cloud-based miner.
