I don't think mining is currently profitable if you still have to buy all the equiptment yet.
However, that's with the current price. If you stash your mined BTC (which are now worth about, let's say $600), if might have been profitable in the long run (when the value might be about, for example $1500). However, that's quite a gamble (in which you shouldn't be involved with money you can't afford to loose / money you lend).
Short term trading etc is still profitable (if you know how to, and got some luck).
Why don't you just buy BTC? If you actually just stash mined BTC from bought machines, the profits would be way smaller, shipping fees, overpriced equipments. It is better to use that amount of money to buy BTC as the fees combined would still be smaller than the loss from mining.
I totally agree with you. That's also the way I roll. I quit mining since many months now. But what I ment to say was that mining still might be profitable. So if the topicstarter is really into mining, he might ROI in the long run.
Directly buying BTC instead is a smarter step in my opinion too, but hey, that's his own decision.
Mining can still be profitable. There are so many variables. Electricity and room is a lot of it. With cheap electricty and lot's of extra room I am lucky. I imagine in San Fransisco these are a premium so do ROI, also look at hosted if want to mine. Again do ROI.
As far as "own currency exchange building". It is very hard to do legally and compete. To get to where coinbase is you would have to most likely in spend hundreds of thousands to become a operating currency exchange in us. Yes... you can do something like localbitcoin, but in US this is technically considered money laundering.
So far no one I know of has been in trouble for just localbitcoin trading, there has always been something larger that caused it to be looked into. But look into money laundering before doing your own currency exchange. Or better yet talk to a lawyer who can help you on business idea who knows far more then me
