My point is that if a coin is profitable to mine with gen1 ASIC then gen2 ASIC can merge mine it for no additional cost thus making it unprofitable for gen1. Not like Litecoin that can't be mined with SHA256 ASIC.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your post.
I don't think I explained myself thoroughly in the OP.
When gen1 ASICs become unprofitable, people will be looking for a way to make them profitable again. There will be a huge incentive for someone that wants to create a truly innovative SHA-256 coin. I will lay out the basic business plan here:
1. Buy unprofitable ASICs for pennies on the dollar.
2. Design and develop a ground breaking SHA-256 coin. Better than all ALTs existing and better than Bitcoin itself.
3. Hash power will be split between Bitcoin and this new better alternative by speculators and people that believe in this new coin being better than Bitcoin. The split in hash power will allow the overlay to make gen1 ASICs profitable because hashing power is split in between Bitcoin and this new alternative coin.
...
Also, it doesn't even have to be a new SHA256 ALT coin. Perhaps a lot of development is done to an existing one to where it is more valuable to the community. Huge market shifts (UP!) in the value of SHA256 ALT coins could dramatically change the profitability of SHA256 mining.
01BTC10's point still stands.
If a first gen ASIC is a money loser when mining BTC, it'll be a money loser on any alt-coin as well. Why? Because if it's NOT a big money loser, then everyone with 2nd Gen ASIC's will pile into that network as well, and push the difficulty up enormously, rendering your Gen-1 chip just as unprofitable to mine with.
Say for example the network reaches the point where running a first gen ASIC earns you negative 25 cents per month (lets's say it gets out 0.01 BTC, but electricity costs you $1.75, but a 2nd gen chip earns .3 BTC at an electricity cost of $0.30). You "discover" that you can mine CoinX at a profit - the ASIC still costs $1.75 to run, but you earn enough of these new coins that when converted to BTC, you''re earning 0.03 BTC/month. This news will get around rapidly. So you'll have all these owners of 2nd gen chips paying $0.30 for electricity and earning 0.03 BTC per month per chip moving to this new coin. Because, remember, if it's profitable you with a 1st gen, then it's even more someone with a second gen chip, who could theoretically earn 0.09 BTC rather than 0.03 BTC.
So, A, the difficulty rate will skyrocket to the point that your returns will be either nonexistent or negative once again. Or B, the value of the new coin will drop to the point, again, that your 1st Gen ASIC will struggle to break even when compared agains a Gen 2would make.
I think the thing is, you're looking for what is commonly known as "free lunch". Yes, those specials occassionally come to light, but they last an incredibly short amount of time before the market learns about it and adjusts.
Basically, look at the dollar denominated output of a miner and coin. If a miner can mine $10 of bitcoin in a day, then that's basically the cap for any other SHA alt coin. Why? If the same hardware could generate $30 per day for the miners, then every miner would scramble to the new coin and BTC transactions would co unconfirmed for ages.
So, no. There really won't be a use for 1st generation mining equipment once it's reached the end of it's life. That's the whole thing about "Application specific", they're built ONLY to perform the exact calculations that Bitcoin requires. And that's I'm become more and more convinced that this whole thing is a folly. By "thing" I mean hardware mining. No matter how much hashing power gets thrown on the network, the network will always be extremely vultnerable to a dedicated attacker. And transactions will always take minutes and minutes to confirm (the other day, i had to wait almost an hour for a 4 BTC transaction to go through. AND i'd added 0.004 for the miners. But that's a different story.
All that we're doing with ASIC's is spending a LOT of money to stay in the same place. Or to get short term, incremental advantage over oner another. I said it in a different thread, but the failure here is us. None of us are thinking up any real business ideas for Bitcoin, we're all convinced that the easiest and grandest fortunes are to be gotten from mining. If that continues to be the case, we're not going to see the mass adoptions of BTC that we dream about, because why will people choose to convert to Bitcoin if the only purpose is to convert back to fiat when it's time to spend the money>
Enough money is being wasted lining the pockets of Friedcat, BFL, KNC Miner, Avalon and every other person that even whispers that they're thinking about creating a new ASIC. Don't throw even more down the drain trying to scoop up peoples otherwise worthless 1st gen devices when they start getting thrown in the dustheap.