IS MINING STILL PROFITABLE IN 2020?

This is a not-so-technical post

So I am still very new in the tech sphere, so my terminology and knowledge are a bit...well, to be honest, I am a noob--just putting that out there.

I recently started my coding journey ago a month ago, which has been fun. This has plunged deeper into this rabbit hole of some sort where one concept leads to another and I keep digging trying to understand all. Now I have a new interest--curiosity, if you want to call it that, and it has led me down another rabbit hole and I have basically neglected my programming tutorials for about 24hours (yeah, it has been that long and I feel like a terrible person).

So I stumble upon a tweet by @mistakili about a day or two ago which spoke about this crypto mining app and I decided to check it. Cool stuff. Prior to this time I never really know what mining was about (yes I have been in this industry for two years. Shame on me!). So I did some digging and I was intrigued by the prospect of earning with a laptop. Then I started to hear things like clouding mining, GPU mining, CPU mining, etc the one that caught my fancy was GPU Mining. Prior to this time, I knew little about GPUs. Fortunately, now I can tell the difference between a CPU and GPU (thank God!).

So i thought to my self: "how much will it cost me to get a mining rig?". Well, the answer is a lot! Roughly about $1000 which is about 450,000naira now and the occasional cost of maintenance and payment for power consumption which is another major issue. First of all, we don't have a constant power supply in this part of the world(weird right? I know). So i would have to opt for a generator and given the power these mining rigs consume it is just not an option.

The cheapest mining i can build will cost me around 120,000naira ($240), which will basically improve my PC's GPU performance whilst allowing me to leverage on cloud mining. But is it worth it? Well, that's something i will have to find out myself. It's going to take me about 3months to get all i need for my mini mining rig.

What profit margin am i looking at?

Nothing to the extreme at this point. Anything within $50-$100 would do. I can cover the cost of my electricity bill with this and still have money to do some basic things.

The fun part of this whole experiment is that i still get to keep my rig which can provide some awesome computing power for gaming on mine. And hopefully, after i have saved enough from mining i can get a better high-end for my programming purpose.

So let me know in the comment section what are you thinking about mining in 2020? Have you contemplated mining? Have you mined any cryptocurrency? What was your experience? Share with me in the comment section.