Do not pay attention to idiots who are saying mining is profitable, it requires you 5 seconds to see with your own eyes the truth, mining is dead at moment.
https://whattomine.com/coinsThis is actually not true. We(OCTOMINER) work together with multiple big 1MW+, 10MW+ mining farms around the world and it all comes down to electricity price right now. Yes, profits are less than before but mining is till profitable.
Most of our big clients pay around 4-5 cents per KW/H for electricity and their current ROI calculations are around 10 months for ASIC and around 16 months for GPU at the current crypto prices. Once the bull run starts, these times will shorten and big investors realise this. We have first hand knowledge in this, since we supply mining hardware to some of the bigger mining farms in USA and Canada.
Right now there is a big wave of Antminer S9 replacing going on. New and more efficient SHA-256 miners are being launched and the big mining farms are currently replacing their S9's in the mass. They need to do this to stay profitable. Bitmain shipped around 3 million Antminer S9 units last year. We are working with the mining farms to get the S9 units replaced with newer and more efficient ASICs .
Indeed the truth is in the middle. 10 month for ASICs and 16 for GPUs are too optimistic times. The probability of decreasing Bitcoin price to 4000$ is still significant. It could be because of the news of government prohibitions or disagreement in crypto community.
I would calculate the mining investment return about 2 years (with new hardware, with used hardware it could be less by two times)