There are no ASICS for ethereum and probably you will not benefit from them a lot more than from GPU becasue they use scrypt with 2GB+ tables instead of sha256 (like in bitcoin).
There are no ASICs for Ethereum. It's currently impossible to get latest gen GPUs from any retailer, or for anything close to retail price on eBay, because there's a mad rush to get into Ether mining.
That's incredible, I remember when it was impossible to get ASIC miners from ButterflyLabs and we were all up in arms because of their inappropriate behavior. That was a niche vendor producing items that had basically no other uses.
GPU makers didn't sign up to build machines that print money. But it turns out when you do make machines that can print money, people tend to buy them at a rate faster than you can make them! Right away, whether or not you did it on purpose.
(I did get my ASIC Jalapeño miners from BFL before they were busted up, I did order more when they came around and offered to let everyone order more, and I still did manage to earn a pittance over and above my initial investment on both batches, regardless of the absolutely ridiculous production and shipping delays.)
Hah, I remember the BFL fiasco. When my Jalapeno arrived five months after ordering, I looked at the hashrate, etc, and turned right around and sold it for twice what I'd paid.
That's about what I made mining with it overall before the limit approached zero. Maybe twice what I paid *if you count cash dollar values only (keeping the BTC I spent would have obviously been a much better deal, if I held them til today!)
This worked better than it would have otherwise, because my employer had electricity priced into the rent at a flat rate, and told me he wouldn't mind if I threw these things into the server room.
(I got two early batch and four 10GHash later on for a total of about 50GHash. I don't remember exactly how long, but I am sure I waited a lot longer than 5 months.)
My recollection of how Bitcoin turned out indicates that most of those people will not make money. That, in fact, the simple rules of how markets work mean that most cannot make money, on several counts:
* Those with resources will have an edge, and will buy an optimal number of GPUs to get return before the price is driven down
* Anyone without resources will not be able to mine quickly enough to get a return before the price is driven down
* If the market were still lucrative, the GPU makers would not be selling all of their stock, which means it is a near certainty that either the GPU makers or someone with connections has already snapped up a healthy share
* Worse, the more lucrative it is, the more quickly ASIC makers will release ASICs which make those GPU investments all but worthless for mining.
All of this means that anyone contemplating whether they should get into mining already has their answer: "no".
> All of this means that anyone contemplating whether they should get into mining already has their answer: "no".
That certainly seems to be the consensus on the mining forums I'm following. /r/EtherMining is now inundated with people who lack the very basic skills needed to assemble a computer and run mining software, but are attracted to the prospect of free money. Many of those people also lack the ability to do basic arithmetic and the sense to realize that the only way they will turn a profit is if the USD value of ETH rises sharply -- and that if that happens they'd be better off in any case just buying ETH now instead of blowing $2000 - 3000 on equipment.
I'm not sure AMD has a corporate policy that makes it easy for them to just stop sales and start mining.
Your other points are fair, but they take time to catch up. Depending on how much you're buying the GPU for and your electricity price, it may make sense still. Also, another coin may become popular.
Well no, actually. Good Nvidia cards are also nearly extinct, because they are actually still profitable for Ethereum mining. So when people couldn't find AMD cards, they settled for bying Nvidia.
Unlike the situation with Bitcoin a few years ago, Nvidia cards are ok for mining Ethereum (something like 40-50% lower hash rate than AMD, but still very much profitable).