I'm not going to leave mining completely, just taking a break. Once the ASICs start shipping and there isn't a massive backlog I'm going to order several and start mining again. I'm just hoping that the ASICs actually start shipping soon.
I tell you, I've been running the numbers, and I'm beginning to wonder if ASIC's are even going to be able to cut the mustard. Figure the most efficient unit announced so far is ASIC at 60 GH/60 Watts for $1,299 and the most powerful per dollar is the BTCGPGA at 72GH/80-120 Watts for $1,069.
So, let's kick in a _conservative_ difficulty increase of 10x, and I say conservative because BFL has already said they have enough orders to bump the network at least that high. With power costs of .10/kwh and a BTC/$ rate of $12.50, the hardware breakeven is:
BFL: 132 Days
BTCFPGA: 88 Days
So at _best_ you're looking at a minimum of 3 months before you can break even, and that's assuming the difficulty doesn't ramp up higher during that time, which is rediculous. I'm beginning to think that if $/BTC doesn't jump drastically or BFL/BFGA don't increase their hashing/watt/$ drastically, you could easily end up in a situation where you never actually break even.