Cryptocurrency Mining Profitability in 2020: Is It Possible?

Miner profitability metrics are based on a handful of factors regulating difficulty and emission, which are hard-coded into the blockchain's attributes, making it predictable to work with.

While predictability does not always immediately translate into profitability, it gives a blockchain certain parameters to rely on when predicting when mining cryptocurrency will become profitable, at which price level, and at which difficulty level during the emission cycle.

Bitcoin mining difficulty is currently at an all-time high between 110 and 120 million terahashes per second, indicating that a lot of new mining capacity has been added to the network, but since the price hasn't fully recovered from the dip caused by the emergence of COVID-19, we should expect most of the miners being temporarily at a loss.

Ethereum mining has been, for a while, among the most profitable in the altcoin space primarily because of the high average price of its token.

While mining has previously supported the network in the phase where it isn't widely used for transactions, in the future, the network will be compelled to take on staking nodes as validators in order to provide sufficient transaction capacity.

In the long run, this may have a positive effect on mining if we assume that mining will be phased out gradually.

The price of electricity isn't a factor when mining profitable altcoins with GPU rigs.

Regarding profitability alone, mining Bitcoin would probably require an investment beyond the reach of most retail miners on the initial cost to be remarkable at the peak of this emission cycle.

With difficulty adjustments and profitability in public blockchains with significant utility value such as Bitcoin, mining can be seen as a profitable business in the foreseeable future.

The only credible factor that may upset the status quo in mining PoW cryptocurrencies at the moment seems to be the theoretical introduction of widespread quantum computing with enough accessible tools to create an incentive to attack public blockchains.