Is it lucrative? Oh, just show your brand new and shiny GPU to your GF and tell her that it's exclusively for mining and she can't have fun rendering on it, because you don't want to go below xxx mega-hashes per second; suddenly she'll become nicer than ever before, haha.
I still have a lot of reading to do, but the most important thing: you can't go wrong with mathematics... plus I like the idea of nerds becoming economists. :-]

@jago25_98, wherever there's risk and some hope for gain (or at least a hope for a lack of loss), there's speculation; for example I'm speculating that I'll live another day, but I can't be 100% sure that I will.