If you have the luxury of mining cryptocurrency as a hobby without having to sell it right away, you shouldn’t be worrying about the profitability statistics on whattomine.com or similar sites. They are irrelevant. What you should be worrying about is creating coins on platforms you either believe in, or want to speculate on.
I’ve been doing a lot of speculative mining (spec mining) with my rigs as of late. I’m doing this specifically with coins that offer a combination of mining and masternodes. I mine the minimum collateral to build the master node, I spin it up, and fire it off. I move onto the next coin. I then harvest the proceeds of those masternodes to buy other projects.
People will tell you it’s stupid to mine when you can just buy on an exchange. Not so fast bub, where did your seed money come from? The traditional banking system?
My main point here is the mining and subsequent masternode block rewards are value created outside of any fiat system. Your onramp isn’t coinbase, it’s a power bill. You are exchanging hardware and power costs for value that exists outside of any centralized system. This is huge. These saplings of value can grow unabated into a forest of mighty oaks. I’m not saying that everyone should be opening huge mining data centers and drive themselves into bankruptcy. What I am saying is that generating value completely outside of the centralized fiat system is worth breaking even on or even taking a small loss (I.E. paying a premium for). Your new value exists completely within the crypto ecosystem, within ‘The Matrix’ if you will.
Don’t be so quick to dump those ‘unprofitable’ mining rigs on eBay. If you haven’t gotten into mining yet, buy some cheap equipment other people are dumping. Create some fricken coins people, but just don’t go broke doing it.