What do you think is the near future of bitcoin  mining ??
As of my perspective of view the bitcoin will die when dhe difficulty rise above any profit unles the code for hashing will be in some way modified to allow further profitable mining.
When you look back what was the exchange rate for btc befor fpga came in the game ? A few bucks per btc. It was nearly not worth to mine and spend the money for electricity.But the reward for succesfully hashed block was 50btc and everyone was able to buy couple of GPUs and start mining. Ofcourse who wanted the real big money than he needed to make real investment . Asa same as it is now with that diferents that when u desided to mining in biger scale with gpus u just went to the next store an bough some of gpus.
Today when u deside to doo mining in bigher scale u need pre order equipoment u will get at best in 90 days and u r happy that you got it or at worst case scenario u get scamed and the seller runs with you money and you never see them again.
So at thees days it is more risky than it was a year ago.
. Now for next four years we have 25btc for succesfully calculated block .But the exchange rate rised at his highest point nearly to 200 bucks per btc (saw it somewere but cant find a reliable source for the highest rate) anyway the exchange rate waries now at 90-100 bucks per btc.And thhis was caused by asic technology entered the mining. It was again profitable to mine btc. At the begining the manifackturers where seling th e mashines for dollars only . But affter they realized that if they realy want to make profit and sell their produckt th ey need to use btc . They realized that when ppl will need btcoin then there will be also demand for mashines that can mine btc with high profitability and then for ppl  need to buy the new asics to stay profitable or even get rich . But as more asic mashines r added to the computin power of all units in to system, the difficulty rise above and byond the scale . There r lot of prediction out there that says that with all the power that is going to be deployed to the system by wariouse well known manufackturers and some new and some diy projeckts the difficulty will explode the scale.
The manufackturers r now seling mashines with significant profit so they have room to lover theyr prices for the future or just sell more powerful mashines for the same price.
But there will be an end , some prediction say that to the end of 2014 or even earlier the difficulty rise so high than not even the pools can get any profit out of the mining.
So maybe then we will need a new eqiwalent to wat bitcoin is now.
That prob means new mashines or to reset btc to point zero as this is or bether sed this was in the history the way how to save economy befor the selfdestuction.
What is the next step in technology to succefuly continue the btc ´mining.
When asics reatch their limits do we return back to fpga ? The fpga as known can use nearly any algorytm without changing hardware .Where todays asics miners can only be used to hash bitcoin.