I'm curious about these ASIC rigs and chips that are hitting the market.  If a company spends tens or hundreds of thousands building efficient rigs for bitcoin mining, and let's say bitcoin goes bust... are these chips essentially useless? It's my understanding that they can't be reprogrammed to use a different form of currency such litecoin for instance or for other computations.  So basically it's written into the chip and it's only used for this process?

If anyone can shine any light on this for me I'm extremely curious.