[enko]

I've seen some mining rooms which disprove your notion that GPU-only mining will stop the capitalised players having an advantage. They always will.

And yes, it's always a balancing act. The network adjusts the difficulty based on total hashrate, not on power efficiency, which is just an overhead. More and more people will pile in until the difficulty is high enough to render mining unviable. However, ASICs at least will shift the balance more towards hardware costs vs the raw power cost that it is now, and reduce the number of useless components that need to be manufactured, etc.

[zanny]

The difference is if those with capital have a linear scaling of power in the mining or if there is a sheer cliff followed by linear growth, because without an ASIC you can't effectively mine at all.

Everyone has a GPU, and your gpu is usually on the same magnitude of efficiency (assuming its modern) as the optimal GPU miner for any given algorithm. With ASICs, the barrier to entry is huge, so you have less "casual" miners. The casual miners significantly dilute the power of concentrated mining operations.

[sliverstorm]

Capital still begets capital, but with GPU mining at least you don't have to have five figures just to get into the game.