At what point do we need to see a significant increase in price to offset what could be a very large change in difficulty?
It's different for every person depending on their power rate and the efficiency of their mining gears, if the price stays the same and the next difficulty epoch is 10% higher, that will be the point for so many folks running 70w/TH or higher and pay above 8 cents, IMO miners should be prepared for a never-ending difficulty increase which isn't going to be offset by price for the long run, but as it stands right now, mining is very profitable for those who bought gears at reasonable prices.
I like to see the numbers you put there. I am adding a few Antminer S19j Pro that will arrive in January and have a rate of .06. My goal is to have those paid off in 8 months after they are delivered and start mining. While I am expecting the difficulty to increase between now and then, I would hope that the price does as well. From what I can tell right now after electricity they are making about $35-40/day. From what I can tell I can afford to go down to about $20 profit and I will just about break even after 1 year of mining. If not as long as there is a spike in price at some point over the year it should even out. My initial plan is to sell what I mine monthly until I am in the green and then look at holding 60% in BTC and spreading out the other 40% in USD or other investments.