I think history will repeat itself like it did between 2014-2016 and mining "might" be profitable again.
Basically people bought GPUs like crazy at the end of 2013 and first quarter of 2014. There was tons of GPUs mining. Then it cost more in electricity than profit so every quarter or so people sold their GPUs to gamers and left the mining world.
Then when 2016 came around... nobody was GPU mining anymore. And it took pretty much more than a year for the GPUs to be sold out everywhere.
Same thing will happen this time.
At the end of 2018... mining will become unprofitable. People will unplug their rigs... wait a year... still not profitable... then sell on eBay/Craiglist. When most GPUs get sold to gamers... that's when mining will become profitable again.
I have been thinking about why traffic is heading downwards on my favorite Bitcointalk threads and I have a theory. As GPU mining gets wiped out in this cycle, there is less and less to talk about with regard to mining programs, settings, issues. And there is only so much to be said as far as "I hate ASICs/I like ASICs."
I think miners are spending more of their time and energy trading and, as a consequence, disappearing into Telegram, Discord, and Slack channels.
If you haven't watched the movie "Wolf of Wall Street," it's worth watching. If you were going to set up a boiler room operation today for crypto currencies, let's say somewhere in Asia, how would you do it? You would not be reaching out and making individual phone calls today. I think you would hire people to sit in a room and make positive statements all day long on social media about the coins you were trying to promote. They would just sit and type away. Log in, log out, log in under a different identity, log out, create a new account, log in, log out. Each person monitoring so many threads and different sites relating to a number of assigned coins.
A lot of cryptocoins, certainly the majority, are essentially "penny stocks" all gussied up with new hot catch phrases. When the air goes out of a penny stock, it often goes out in a single day and it never comes back.
I found it interesting that, over the past few days, when I read every prior post of certain individuals, their entire history seemed to consist of nothing but positive comments for a collection of 6 to 12 different coin projects. All positive, all pretty much the same the content. But not just for one coin, more like for an account of different coins that they had been assigned to. And it's not just the haiku bot at work. This is certainly not a new phenomenon, but I think it has been growing. And I think more people are embracing this and making no apologies for it.
If you are spending much more of your time trading, I would be careful.
Sometimes doing nothing can be the best option.