Ofcourse downpaid equipment has some time left to harvest profits.
But we all know that ROI has gone up hundreds of %.
Compare it to january last year... you had like 1 month ROI .. now its 5-8 months. And within that time ROI has gone up more making it slide out of reach eventually.
To keep going or get ROI down, there needs to be some massive investments in coins.
Surely.. if say AMD bought 10 mill dollars in diff altcoins, which is nothing to them, miningprofits would explode again.
The ETH investment is used up and running on fumes. When ETH goes POS the other mining coins will be slaughtered as the reward will be split among them all.
Mining is still profitable as we clearly see on whattomine.com/coins
But ROI and investing in gear at this point is simply high risk and needs big investments to make big profits.
I would not buy a mining farm today.
Why do you think AMD would invest in any coin ? Yeah you think It's nothing to them, but they are all about profit. Investing in coins is same as gambling, do you think any company would like to gamble their money in order to make crypt world a better place for miners? Yeah right.
Mining has actually emptied the stocks before.
Im sure some of the q1+q2 2016 gpu sale boom is related to this.
Right now there are equivalent to 400 000 R9 380's mining ETH/ETC.
Ofcourse this isnt their main market at all, but high end cards and availability has been affected twice by mining.(2013 2016)
The only way gpu mining survives next year is either by someones massive investement, or some new coins with investors willing to tank and lose cash.
https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/cryptocoin-mining-caused-worldwide-shortage-amd-radeon-graphics-cards-gpu/