Mining may continue to be "profitable" but not by the same metric people have been using for the past 12-18 months.
12 or 13 months, that's when the big "price jump" on altcoins happened.
Profitability RIGHT NOW is back down close to where it was in most of 2016 on most coins, the total network hashrate has caught up to the price rise since then.
Specific coins are a bit higher, others are lower, and a couple didn't EXIST that far back (ZCash and it's forked spinoffs being the biggest such group by far).
Bitcoin profifitability is probably still a little ahead, due to the limits of how many ASIC chips Bitmain and it's competition can get out of the foundries limiting hashrate growth.
Litecoin profitability is almost identical to Feb 2017 when I was seriously thinking about shutting my A2 farm down, only to have THAT big price jump change my mind about a week before I started pulling plugs.
A couple of the price dips in the last month have dropped it to a bit BELOW where it was at right before the first big "jump" in 2017, and DEFINITELY below where it was at before the L3 was introduced in late 2016.
GPU mining isn't down to "gotta have super cheap electric" to be profitable YET, but it's dropped enough that HIGH price electric areas are no longer profitable.
You are correct in that it is still somewhat profitable, but as I said it will not be the same going forward as it has been during the past 12-18 months.
The run-up in coin prices helped to mask the corresponding run-up in network difficulties for nearly all coins. This will have the effect of decreasing profitability by a great extent, even if the coin prices were to recover to their highs. Using my 18 month figure, I was able to mine 5 Ethereum a day with one rig back then, but then ETH was only selling for around $10, so $50/day gross for one rig, or about $1500/month.
Now it takes nearly 10 rigs a month or more to produce those same 5 ETH. Assuming identically sized and configured rigs we have 10 rigs x 30 days or 300 times more effort put in to mine the same 5 ETH which (today) is going for around $700 each, or $3,500 for all five. Dividing $3,500 by 300 we get about $11.66/day per rig, so about 1/5th that when the run-up first started. However network difficulty continues to go up daily and the price looks more likely to go down than it does up, so this is what I meant is that we are now approaching the same point we did about 18 months ago in terms of profitability, but this time it is going down and not up.
So any calculations or metrics one used during this last 12-18 months will no longer be valid going forward as difficulty is not going down, but the price likely will, or at the best stay stagnant. So while you may still may be able to eke out some small profits in the coming months, it is not likely to be anywhere near the levels we just lived through.
One of the biggest factors is with the high difficulties you just cannot accumulate any significant amount of coins. Using my previous example back when you could earn 5 coins/day on a rig even though the profits were about 5x better (assuming you sold as you mined) you would only need to sell maybe one tenth of what you mined in coins to pay your electric bills, as 1 rig doesn't draw a lot of energy. Now that you need to power ten rigs, you expenses went up 10 fold, while your profit is already lower than it was then, but also there is the reduced "potential" for future profit to consider.
Setting aside 50 or 100 ETH per month back then was no big deal, now it will be impossible for all but the largest miners to accumulate such amounts for future speculation. Holding on to that excess production and selling at 100x price is where the majority of the big profits came into play. Even if you did everything you possibly could do wrong in mining 12-18 months ago, if you managed to hold even a few coins and sell during the highs you came out on top.
I won't even go into how even building a rig now is almost 2x as much as it cost back then so the payback period is hardly even feasible, but that's another argument.
So no matter how you want to look at it, the profits going forward will not be equivalent to those we just witnessed. The price of ETH would need to jump to $70,000 each for such a future potential to exist in today's environment.
Note I just used ETH as an easy example, but most coins went through the same stages so their figures would be similar.
