Yeah if Bitmain with their production capability starts making Scrypt Miners, it will be the beginning of the end for LTC mining IMO

I've been saying for a while now that the future of Bitcoin mining is in Altcoin mining and Bitmain may be catching on to that realization.

I believe your conspiracy theory is correct and they've been mining with L1/L2 etc internally for a while now.

Also, check out Inno's last post speaking about "No Competition for next 3 months" -- I'm betting they knew Bitmain was coming with this.

So basically, as soon as those become available for all, they're pretty much dead as ROI goes ? ASIC market seems to have been cornered for a while....

I dont think that the difficulty will go to skyrocket.

201GH - it is only 10% of total hashrate.
L3 will have no ROI only if the difficult will increase in 3 time (300% or 6 TH).
I dont think that it will be.

From what i can see nowadays with Asic, either you have a big lot of money to invest when new hardware get out, and then you make back on your investment, but if you don't have much to invest, it's probably going to be a loss.

 I suspect a fair bit of that WOULD be new A4 units - but it did seem a bit extreme for nothing BUT A4s.

 We're a bit overdue for a price war in Scrypt-mining land....

I ordered one L3 to verify performance, I think for reasonable price at this day.($1899 with shipping)
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Scrypt-Miner-250MH-Antminer-L3-Litecoin-Miner-for-Scrypt-Mining-Substitution-of-A4-Dominator/32786842019.html?

If you buy it through them and use a CC, you can reverse the charges either using their buyer protection or your credit cards no fraud.

The seller in this question has ~3 years reputation and 96.7% positive rating -- its outlined on left side of page.

Thanks to you both..was a little more 'wild west' 2 years ago when I got a 50 buck product..just checking....

I don't know that I share your confidence in Bitmain.  If you hang out on the S9 thread I think you will see there is a pretty high failure rate, and they do not honor their warranty.  So that is the sticking point with anything new like this...

S9 isn't new anymore and every batch they ship people are still reporting issues.  And of course the problems are always "your fault", or ship it back to China and by the time you pay for the shipping and if you got a Willy Wonka golden ticket they "might" cover the repair, but it is going to cost you almost what it would cost to send it to BitmainWarranty in Denver by the time you factor in shipping, down time etc. 

So the warranty from Bitmain is useless and their hardware as of late has been questionable.  So that is a sticking point for me. At least with the Inno A4 so far I have not heard of anyone who has had a hardware failure.  Inno appears to just make solid stuff<knock on wood>.  We can only hope that the L3 is a better product that the S9 series.