As it stands for 20th November 2018 , yes mining is still profitable an will most likely be till crypto currencies exist. All depends what is you costs to run hardware and what hardware you using to mine and what currencies you are mining. Of course it isn’t as profitable as it used to be little less then a year ago.

But yes one of the biggest players and affecting you mining profits is your power costs , cause in most of the cases your only cost is power. As lower you power cost as longer you can survive in this mining environment, as longer you can survive as longer you as bigger gains you can get.

My power costs is quite high here , I pay 13c which is about little bit more then average worldwide. Currently my gpus doesn’t make anything in mining , just costs me money. As there is big total market cap drop in last few days and bitcoin hovering now around 4500 usd mark. But luckily there is hardware which is still profitable for mining at my current electric rate which is few types of asic miners and also the new thing FPGa mining. You might seen it in my previous post on YouTube , my tests and setup on BCU1525. Which is still very new and there is very limited software that could be used to mine cryptos. At the time of the video I was running bitstream with mining nexus coin 3.5usd a day and probably a lot less now as the markets has crashed even more. So I got my hands on a private bitstream for the same dev whitefire, who developed Nexus bitstream. But the biggest issues im facing is to cool down this peace of hardware as it uses a lot of power and has only passive cooler, and air cooling with extra fans doesn’t help as much. So I have figured out to air cool this fpga in Antminer s9 case and running this fpga with 80% efficiency and mining 12usd a day. I just cannot tell yet which currency and bitstream im using as whitefire doesn’t want it to release it yet, before its not tested properly.

 

So this is what I did to cooldown :

  1. Dissembled Antminer S9 and removed all the useless S*** whats inside.
  2. Removed  BCU1525 cover
  3. Attached all the cables and put in case.
  4. Changed fans which where on to S9 to Delta QFR1212GHE

This got the temperatures down to 67c at all times.

So guys to answer you question, if mining is profitable. It is , but it is like a race whoever can do most efficient , of course the return of investment isn’t as high as it used to be but is still profitable depending on hardware and your running costs you are using. And if gpu mining will ever come back , im not sure how long it will take and maybe till profit on gpus returns there will be more efficient gpus out there. And if profits also stays like this, also I have lost money on buying gpus for mining. But its ok its part of the game.