I am really pumped on the Altcoin trading, though. Last question: I am trying to get into the community and connect with people to discuss investment strategies and so forth. I am not giving too much about the youtube channels, do you know a good place to start making such contacts?
A lot has happened in the mining world, yes, but probably not any more or less than it has been for the past five years or so! In fact, I think the introduction of ASICs was the last really big thing to happen, so new chips are to be expected regularly. Miners themselves will tell you that it's hard enough to keep profitable on their own rigs, so you can imagine more so if you're on cloud mining contracts with lower profit margins.
This year cloud miners will say they made profits - but this has really been down to the price of Bitcoin which is >700% higher than it was less than a year ago. If you had simply bought Bitcoin with half your money and used the other half to buy a 1-yr hashflare contract a year ago... Now imagine if the price went down instead...
Still, good luck with your journey, don't forget to hit me up in PM if you actually do visit Hydro (I'm curious).
To your last question... can't say I've found TOO many useful places to learn, but you should of course spend time in this section:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=8.0
Goes without saying, don't follow anything blindly.