I've read a lot of "Welp bitcoin is no longer profitable" but I did some calculations and it seems pretty lucrative to me, but maybe there is something I don't quite see. I am pretty new to this scene and can be completely wrong about any of these details. I'm also not factoring in internet cost as I am paying for internet either way.
For example, I can buy an Antminer S5 for about $400 and expect to get about 1 Th/s out of it. This unit operates at 590W, so I did some numbers to crunch the electricity cost.
Electricity in my area is pretty high, with max tier usage coming in at about $0.32/kWh and baseline costing about $0.16/kWh. These can probably kept minimal with a commercial account, but let's pretend like I'm running it out of my bedroom. At max cost, I figured the electricity would cost $0.32/kWh * 0.59 kW/h * 24 h/day * 31 days/month = $140.47/month. That's a pretty high electricity bill, but let's compare that to how much it could make.
I'll be using Slush's pool as an example. Slush's pool usually has a collective hash rate of about 34 Ph/s. Your reward through this pool is calcuated by (Your Scoring Hash Rate/Pool Scoring Hash Rate)*0.98. So let's go through the calculations:
(1Th/s / 3400 Th/s) * 0.98 * 25BTC/block * 3 blocks/day * 31 days/month * ~$400/BTC= $265.06/month.
This means that per my calculations you would get a small, but definitely noticeable profit of at least $100/month. Obviously there is uncertainty in the whole bitcoin universe and difficulty will go up, but this to me seems like a much better investment to make money than gambling on penny stocks.
Please let me know if I'm mistaken!