The important thing is to use FPGA, all electricity prices will go up since it's a free market. So it doesn't matter if you live in a country with lots of hydro like me (Sweden has 50% hydro) our corporations will just sell to Germans for a lot of money when peak oil hits.
Well, rest assured we are fine till "peak oil hits" !
FPGA is a long way off being as good in terms of $/mhash compared to GPUs.
your right but it is far more profitable and will be much more soon when blocks get cut to 25 coins per
an FPGA miner can give 380Mhash and only use 20 watt, well thats profit baby
you not get the highest speeds but your not using any electricity hardly at all
10 x FPGA miners is = 1 x 5870
so if you had 10 x FPGA @ 380mhash your getting 3.8 Ghash for the same electrical cost as running a 440Mhash GPU
The size of the block reward changing doesn't make FPGA better or worse. Sure it may cut revenue (but really only price * block size / difficulty matters) but that affects the ROI% of both products equally.
For miners w/ high electrical cost (say >$0.25) FPGA is the only thing that makes sense. In time as the network gets more and more efficient that line will drop lower and lower but the block reward getting cut in half doesn't change the economics at all. The main advantage of FPGA is it levels the playing field as electrical cost is less of a factor in total operating cost. It also creates a very low floor.
(@ 1.25M difficulty, 50 coins per block, $0.10 per kWh)
5970 (on very efficient rig ) ~ 2.6MH/W. electrical cost per coin = $1.15
ztex FPGA ~22 MH/W. electrical cost per coin = $0.14
At current conditions if the price fell below $1.15 I would need to stop mining but w/ a ztex GPU I could mine even if price fell to $0.14.