The future on *coin mining and profitability

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Lets face it, when ASICs get in the hands of more people, the question of wither or not you should start mining bitcoins will be out of the question, it will be way to difficult to mine.

So my question is, what coins should I and other people start looking at for mining? If i were to purchase an ASIC, would it work with other SHA-256 coins? Would it be a better idea to get into GPU mining of other scrypt coins? How will the (huge) rise in bitcoin difficulty effect altcoins?

I'll leave this up to debate with the community, I look forward to hearing your thoughts.