If you already have GPU mining rigs, I assume you (and most people) will switch to Litecoin. In the past few days it's actually been a bit more profitable to mine LTC and sell for BTC then to mine BTC directly. And there are also a lot more Litecoins that can be mined. We just have to keep the interest of people like you a bit longer so that more services can be developed.
Just curious, how difficult is it to modify a ASIC rig to mine LTC?
I suppose there's always the possibility of a new xyzCoin based on different hashing algorithm(s), which will screw the ASIC?
It is impossible to mine LTC with that ASIC
You need to make a new ASIC, make the project, invest some millions $ to start making the chip and then you can mine LTC with your new ASIC.
It was supposed to be impossible to mine it on a GPU, look how that turned out they are hashing away right now..
GPUs are programmable devices, custom ASICs are single-purpose. A custom ASIC could be designed to be programmable, but then all you have is an expensive and slow FPGA or CPU kind of thing.
So LTC was the one design for CPU-mining only? Since they both use SHA-256, it won't be a surprise a LTC ASIC maker will be able to reuse most of the BTC ASIC design. In order to be truly effective, it has to make the hashing algorithm prohibitively complex for ASIC.
If an ASIC was specifically designed for Scrypt (the LTC proof-of-work), it would be many magnitudes faster than anything else. LTC does not make use of SHA256 for the proof-of-work.
Hopefully that litecoin ASIC is far in the future. I'm more concerned about all the Bitcoin GPU's jumping to the LTC ship in October/november.