As I said, anyone who doesn't want to take the time should gtfo.
You are wrong. They should mine with nicehash
Nicehash sometimes IS the best option.
I make more there on my A2s than I do through pool mining, and have done so for a month or so.
It was also more profitable on my 1070s than any other option for a lot of the last 2 months.
Just gotta crunch the numbers with allowance for all the fees involved in ALL options.
Bitcoin has only seen *2* halfings to date - and the next one isn't due for over 3 years.
The best way for a small miner to be profitable today, JUST LIKE for the big farms, is to be located in an area with low electric costs.
please define "low electric costs" in USD
5 cents or less to have a good chance to compete and some chance to achieve ROI not factoring in used gear sales.
3 cents or less to be VERY competative with a good chance to achieve ROI without factoring in used gear sales.
10 cents at this point is break-even or worse with a lot of recent gear, and iffy to ROI on any more (GPU coins have an advantage that the GPU tends to retain more value so you can resell it at some point).
It's entirely possible to achieve 3 cent electric in a residential/small business setting in the US, but the places you can do so are 2 specific counties in Washington State - and one county next to those that is at 4.5ish for small consumption folks.
I don't know if there are any other areas of the US that you can get to less than 5c for a residence/small business location, but there are a few others you can manage that at "industrial" scale consumption and get well under 10c on residential/small business.
Forget trying to mine most stuff on NVidia 9xx series cards, unless you already HAVE them on hand or can find them DIRT cheap or have crazy-cheap-to-free electric - the efficiency is too low to manage ROI.
XMR on a CPU might be profitable on an Intel, but AMD don't CPU mine that worth beans.