For someone who knows how to wait, bitcoin is always profitable. This does not change for deep-rooted projects. But I do not think the same thing for altcoins. They are affected by fluctuations very quickly.
The biggest issue is that there is not a lot of people like that, many people think that they are able to hold for the long term but just look at what happened when the crash appeared out of nowhere, many people that thought that they could hold for years but as soon as they could they sold because they panicked when they saw the price crashing.