Has mining BTC lost its profitability due to the high difficulty? Can people even break even with current hardware prices and difficulty level? I mean current hardware as in hardware that you can use today.
The bare minimum investment that has the potential to turn in a big profit so you can grow your mining operation exponentially bigger over time, tops at hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Even if you want to start low, your option is the pricey 10~15k miners, which won't give you enough profit to buy a new beefier miner when yours turns into the red zone of profit/powercost