Most miners I know go for GPU mining instead of ASIC or CPU and it's understandable: The entry tax is lower and in case everything goes south GPUs could always be sold. Heck, even three year old cards have decent demand, so in case the whole market really crashes there's still a market for those used GPUs. However, no one can deny the digital gold rush has caused a serious GPU shortage and that scarcity has gamers mad. Cards that were released in the $150-$200 price range are selling for $400 apiece and bought in bulk, causing a real trouble for gamers.
Last night I read in /r/NiceHash a thread that candidly joked about the expected profit since yesterday's bitcoin price rise. Mining is dead, sell your cards! was the OP, but the matter is real. Very real.
Vice posted this article stating the some miners are starting to sell their cards due the fall of alt-coin prices.
According to my math, the same graphics card that used to earn about $5 a day now earns less than roughly $2 a day
So the stakes are higher now. In May everyone did their numbers and GPUs were supposed to pay themselves in 60 days, but since may that time has gone as far as 6 months, so the question is evident: Is it really worth it?
For instance, NiceHash is a very popular pool for mining altcoins, but payments are made in BTC regardless of the mining algorithm the user chooses to mine. It makes sense to assume miners are getting an extra bump in profit since the BTC prices rose from $2200 to over $2800 but it's not the case, quite the contrary: Since NiceHash resells miners compute power now the pool is requesting less from miners because orders are down. Only Bitcoin skyrocketed in the blink of one eye, but altcoins are worth roughly the same, so the orders placed in NiceHash by buyers are still the same if not less and the payments (that are made in BTC) are about 30% lower that they were two days ago. In this subreddit the OP asks "Well buyers? ... you going to stop being so damn cheap now?" but the real question is still the same, is it worth it?
The full article Ethereum Miners Are Selling Their Graphics Cards from Vice is worth the read.
Even with little-to-none power costs the profitability is way down, yet not sunken. Now that profits are in the middle term rather than cash out soon, it's a matter of ideology more than business now. A true believer will stay, same as a stubborn, but the ones that came for the quick and easy money are probably take their profits, sell their rigs and invest (or spend) somewhere else. Are you selling or staying for the long run?