When will 3 gh/s become irrelevant?

[skoolbytes]

Any guesses to when a 3gh/s gpu mining computer will become obsolete?  1 month?  2 months? 

I'm debating if it's even worth it to mine BTC or any crypto currency at the moment...

[challen]

I think bitcoin has gone through this before when ppl got their FPGA's, but came back stronger. Who knows what will happen though... Short term its probably not worth mining if you pay for electricity, but long term looks good when it halves again... So long as Uncle Sam stops his shenanigans.

[skoolbytes]

I don't think FPGA's had the same effect on BTC as ASIC's will. 

If my understanding is correct, a few of the advantages FPGA's had over GPU mining is that they consume less power and that you could host more devices than a traditional GPU rig, which could only host 4-5 cards (typically).  ASIC's big advantage is that they consume even less power than FPGA's and the devices  typically have smaller footprint (ie.  Avalon's 85 Gh/s rig vs a horde of FPGA's on racks). 

I'm extremely curious to see how the network hashrate will be over the next several months.  It's only been two months since I started reading into bitcoins and the total network hashrate has doubled as well as the difficulty.  I can't seem to help but wonder what all this computing power can be used for other than mining bitcoins...the amount of computing power is staggering.