Honestly, the best people I think can hope for is that CoinTerra and HashFast fold. If you have a November KnC order, you may have only bought yourself a nice space heater for the winter.
The amount of new companies releasing hardware are going to cause the difficulty to run away from everyone. This is going to get bad. If you are buying next-gen hardware with BTC, you will be at a loss. If you are buying with cash, it might be better to just buy BTC directly instead.
That's a terribly pessimistic outlook.
When GPU's were no longer any use for mining bitcoin, gpu miners swopped over to litecoin.
When the lower end asic miner no longer mine enough BTC to make it worthwhile, they'll switch to an alt too. I assume people with jalapeno's are mining zetacoin or something like that, rather than huddling round it for heat.
I'd say it's fairly likely we'll see a SHA256 alt coin explode in 2014 for this reason.
It's pessimistic but it's true. There are a lot of people interested in mining now. You can thank the April bubble for that. A lot of greedy people out there. They just don't have any clue as to what they're getting in to. Mining has almost never been about mining for profit. The brief FPGA era wasn't too bad because not that many were involved as they are now. ASIC's are just too fast and specs are going to start upgrading every 3 months. And everyone wants one. The only profit in mining is for the hardware developers.
Coins don't explode in value just because miners are interested in them. Higher supply equals lower demand. Services using these coins are what matters. And BTC has all the momentum. No need for Litecoin as the "silver" to Bitcoins "gold" when BTC is both "silver" and "gold". Although alts might have short term value when attempting to trade them for BTC.
Plus you can't just easily point an ASIC to a different coin. It's not like an FPGA with a memory chip.
