There used to be a time when miners used to mine altcoins and just hold them as an asset. I could just choose an altcoin, keep my miner pointed at for several weeks and finally sell it for a bargain (Not just dump it for the highest bidder). There were times when the value of altcoin just used to go up with difficulty level.
Now the altcoin scenario is highly saturated. New coins coming everday and miners are rushing to quickly mine-pump-dump the coins. Buy orders are also shrinking for most of the alts. Adding to this is new exchanges being announced for some of the new alts. So I cant just keep my miner pointed at a coin for more than 2 days. Ironically the value of some of the coins drops with increasing difficulty. A look at most of the topics in Alternate cryptocurrencies section just seem to be self promotion posts.
Simply I used to make 0.006 BTC per day with my 640Kh/s when BTC was 800 to 1000 USD. But now I'm not able to reach those levels (except when I caught the trains with Maxcoin, Myriad...) with BTC valued at 630 USD. Am I the only small scale miner here experiencing these or are you guys all switched to mining farm?
I'm willing to bet the crypto erra isn't over but scrypt algo is as far as profitability goes. Which proves a bit of a problem for newbie miners or anyone who mined scrypt with gui miner. For the last 8 or 9 months that's all I've ever used to mine because it's easy and already dialed in for practically every video card currently available. The newer scrypt-n, Keccek, and multi-algo coins will dominate the market being the most profitable vs ltc simply because these will be gpu mineable and asic resistant for the time being. The problem again is I'm sure there are many people out there like me that do not know how to dial in a miner (or even were to start) for other algo's using cg miner based command line software like vertminer, sgminer etc.