Hello world, new(b) member here...

Currently the biggest BTC mining pool (BTC Guild: https://www.btcguild.com) almost doubled it's speed in the last 2 months.

It's currently at 2176 TH/s (https://www.btcguild.com/index.php?page=pool_stats) or 2 176 000 000 KH/s or the computational power equivalent of about 3 million nVidia Tesla S2070.

According to Forbes, BTC mining consumes electricity worth 15.000.000$ a day which could power approx. 130 000 US-households a whole month.

Some questions:
- (When) will mining become obsolete?
- What happens to all the ASICs/rigs/pools etc. after mining... couldn't they be used for research/simulations (NASA, encryption, physic models, weather simulation)?
- What positive side effects does mining have on the industry and other sectors?