Mining crypto was a big thing for me back in 2011 when I was mining bitcoin on my duel r9 290x at the time and producing nearly 0.01 BTC per day. At the time that felt like nothing but fast forward to today that 0.01 BTC per day is now equal to a whopping $634 for the about $3 of power I was using at the time.
That however didn't last long as soon after ASIC chips starting to show up. This was a result of thumb drive mini miners which took far less power and produced more has in a single thumb drive compared to a power hungry GPU. This turned mining on it's head and why Ethereum was then a welcomed place for a while to do GPU mining with proof of work concepts.
For myself the only way I see GPU mining being profitable anymore and which is starting to gain traction is to produce your own power. Simple rigs with a battery, two solar panels and a small computer style OS such as HiveOS are enough to run a profitable mining operation.
These mini mining farms might look funny but they can actully start to stack up to massive wealth creation and all from green energy.
The idea behind this is because there is zero overhead costs once you have the equipment you can mine forever aka the lifespan of any of the hardware and it's essentially "free" or produces revenue forever.
A single GPU mini farm would net you around $0.30 per day in pure profits but there are larger cards now that would produce more per card with less power. With these newer style cards you'd be able to crank out nearly $1 worth on something like a 3080 RTX card. While that might not sound like a lot at the moment you have to understand that prices change.
*This article is for entertainment purposes only and is not financial advice. Do your own research before investing.
With second hand items you could break even in about a year or less on most of these mini mining projects and the can also be scaled. If you're doing larger projects look for things like government credits for the solar array and second hand cards or older cards you want to upgrade from your own PC etc.
Now this is where proof of stake comes in in which you could in theory take all of that investment money and then instead just buy the proof of stake tokens and sit on them producing revenue this way. However I do believe there is actully more risk here as it's not always profitable. The tokens price could fall dramatically and you could be left with far smaller value. While something like a POW system you could repurpose that power at any point.
Are you currently mining?