Mining is over for us. Only the very wealthy or bulk buyers or those living in China (or wherever the miner comes from) have a chance. If a miner is made in china people can buy it the day of release. Other countries must wait for it to be shipped first and that means they will not be mining anything whilst the Chinese miners get at least an extra week of mining at lower difficulty. They also do not have to pay much for shipping since they live there. Electricity is cheap there as well. They get the best prices on miners as well so they can afford to buy more.
In short, you are competing with people who will buy more then you do for less and mine ahead of time before you do. It makes me sad since bitcoin was meant to be able to be mined by anyone. Then people tale advantage and make miners and ll these other things. I do not understand why mining is not more profitable and to me it makes no sense. Mining is risk and it takes long, it is expensive to get even one miner. What if the miner breaks or something? To me, anyone should be able to mine and make a small trickle of income. I mean you are runnnig expensive and very powerful hardware 24/7 to strengthen the network after all.
Mining Bitcoin is okay but others may not be profitable. Altcoin prices are not really good nowadays, while Bitcoin looks quite good.
I agree, If you are looking to mine, currently Bitcoin is the way to go. However, one other way I like to obtain crypto is by Staking proof-of-stake tokens.
I like POS because then at least you can get in with greater ease as the entry-level investment is much less. The problem is you are mining a coin that most of the time has no value and cannot be spent anywhere and only dumped on the exchange and since there is no demand for it and people generate it through staking there is little need to buy it and it just slowly dies. Go look at the graphs they all just slope down with a few bumps and that is it.