And this is why mining makes zero sense for any individual, at least as a profit making endeavor. When confronted with this scale of computational power, it will be impossible for "the little guy" to make any profit mining.<p>As a side effect, it will effectively centralize control of the currency to a few major computational groups that have the resources to make such big investments. If they ever wanted to cooperate, just a few of these groups could be able to determine policy for bitcoin as a whole.