It's all about price.. BTC Miners are losing money until btc's price up to 10k$...
I'm a gpu miner of Minexcoin and difficulty increased by 10 times last 30 days. Still it's better than ethereum mining.
Anyway, this job is still profitable but it wants labor and time and the profit is not enough for my labor. So I'm thinking about selling my cards...
I guess that now large number of people are looking for alternatives for mining. So I doesn't surprise me to hear that difficulty for Minexcoin increased 10 times. Many consider bailing out like you do, and I guess that is reasonable. If profit doesn't cover basic thing, its not worth doing it. So I guess that because of this things people are selling their equipment for such low prices that OP have seen.
With everything that is going on and things that are comming, we will see even more of things like this.
I want to call you pessimistic, but I see you are cynical after looking in retrospect. I'm on the fence about GPU mining, ETH really resurrected GPU mining, Now that ASICs are taking control - I can't see any better time to sell my GPUs and just stop for a while (still, a part of me wants to swim against the flow). I know that ETH is planning on hardforking but they don't even have any idea how the ASICs work so it would be a guessing game until they are in market and for sale. We know Jihan Wu is just going to keep the delivery to market postponed until whenever he sees fit.