Now a day even with actual mining equipment or hardware specifically designed to mine cryptocoins at a high hash rate, still not profitable due to the ROI (return of investments). If you spent $10K average price to get a 100mh/s at this time, it will take you 6 months or more depend on the hash rate speed of other devices and people are buying and added more hash rate to the network, not taking bitcoin prices into consideration, whether it will go up or down, or got shut down by the government permanently.
However if we’re mining cryptocoins and saving them, meaning we can trade between the coins, alt coins, to Bitcoin whatever, then keep it safe. Safe in this case an offline wallet where hackers will not see to hack. Then mining and saving the coins are fine. Just wait for one day, it will soar again like an eagle, not really like a rocket again, it will not sky rocket, but maybe it will soar like an eagle. Then we can dispose the Bitcoin to USD. This to say if we can afford to pay for electric bill, which isn’t cheap in most places. Some people lucky enough to sneak their equipment into their employers office and mine using their company power, to me, that’s stealing, and consequently will not look good. Others even tried to take advantage of moving into an apartment where free electricity was given and took advantage of that, this include college dorm room and so on where ever free electricity exist, but all these to me consider as stealing which I don’t do.
For me, I’m paying thousand dollars a month on electric bill, sometime I make thousand worth of bitcoin, sometime I don’t. Luckily I have enough Bitcoin sold for cash USD to sustain my home mining operation to pay for electric bill for the next 6 months or more, then I must start selling my Bitcoin to pay for electric bill. Hope by then Bitcoin goes up again, if not then I will loose time and effort and off course Bitcoin, for nothing. Well maybe something, at least I learned and had something to do, instead of going out causing trouble. A person should not be a burden to society, should not lied, be truthful although it might be ugly or embarrassing, but that’s my principle.
On the bright side, let say what I’m paying for electricity today and also pre-order of mining equipment currently is a loss, I don’t pocket a penny at this time and maybe for the next few months, but let say next year or few years from today, what ever Bitcoin I have and I didn’t sold them, and the Bitcoin price at $10K and I have 20Bitcoin, tha’ts $200K cash. Well not really cash, because these cryptocoin are consider taxable entities, like your asset. Maybe by the time Bitcoin reached $10k, the government worldwide already got the tax figured out and maybe also use Bitcoin as world currency then there will be no hiding from tax. Probably not anonymous either, who knows, since there are traces in blockchain of the Bitcoin address transactions movements.