When I saw the name of the thread I was sure here would be Shakespeare's fans but I was wrong.
Pardon me, are you interested in bitcoin mining? don't you take into account altcoins ?
Well i am a Shakespeare fan.
But back on topic, as i said above, altcoins are fine, better yet whatever can be obtained and exchanged without much hassle and can generate some income on the side is perfect. So I'm not biased to any coins be it scrypt or sha-256.
However if the vaule is low or Roi isn't there then of course I would be hesitant to mine the lesser appealing coins. With bitcoins if you have the money to risk then you have the potential to generate more income just due to the fact that one coin is roughly $600 but even when bitcoins were $20 a piece it was worth it in my book because thats $20 generated without me putting effort, its money generated on the side, However Between school and work and other poor business ventures i never got into it, and now im here referencing Shakespeare while asking if mining bitcoins is still profitable.
Looking back through the years, 2009-2010 would have been great years to jump into it, but i figure better late than never.
It's all relative! I mined my first block in late 2010, it took me four days (with my CPU!) and when I checked what I could do with my 50BTC all I could find was one exchange (MtGox) which was based in the US (this was before the sale, and the move to Japan) and only handled USD. And 1BTC was 5 cents or something. I suppose I wished I'd got into mining earlier... but to be honest I just thought it was an interesting experiment, and I lost interest.
Fast forward to 2011, and 1BTC was - incredibly - worth more than the dollar. My poor CPU obviously wouldn't be up to the task, but I did some sums and invested in a GPU. I mined solo at first then, as difficulty rose, I mined in pools. I kept mining until GPUs became obsolete (this was long before altcoins) and then took the decision to stop mining - I could justify GPUs because I could sell them when I'd finished with them. At this point I
definitely wished I'd got into mining earlier...!
At this point - right now - I wish I'd invested in FPGAs and then ASICs. If I did it now it'd be a huge investment for me, with a whole bunch of risk; if I'd simply kept mining then the cost and risk would have come in manageable chunks.
I guess my answer is - it probably isn't too late! But it will heavily depend on your circumstances - how much you have to invest, how much you can afford to lose. And as long as I can remember, people have been advising potential miners that you'll get the best ROI by simply buying BTC. That's probably true, but it's not nearly as much fun (and isn't always possible, anyway: when I started mining you could buy BTC relatively easily - if you lived in the US. There are plenty of countries where there's still no easy way to buy BTC). Whatever you decide - good luck!
Edit: iamahappyminer makes a good point with altcoins - you can always exchange altcoins for BTC if BTC is your goal.
since you mentioned Mtgox, since their fall where else can you exchange bitcoins easily?
as far as money to invest i planed on splitting the cost of a miner with a friend or two, that will not only lower the cost per person, but also lower the risk involved. My current mindset is if i get a miner now(with all companies wanting pre-purchases) by the time i get one of the beefy 2th/s or 3th/s miners will the difficulty rise to where its no longer worth the initial investment