Bitcoin mining, not a chance, not without investing a ton into hardware and elecrticity. Look at the difficulty and the patters of it's rising. I've seen that network hashrate increase from 35ish PH/s just 3 months ago, to over 100 PH/s now. Competing with that now from scratch would be suicide.
If you really want to mine go Scrypt, I thought about doing a thread on this while back for people but the risk in investing back then was too high. However, if you can get your hands on a Scrypt ASIC, then you can turn a profit pretty fast. If you bought a KNC Titan (1st Gen) and paid the full $10,000 USD asking price you would've gotten a rig capable of mining at around 300 MH/s. There's a guy in my Litecoin pool with 3 of them. Might sound hard to believe, but with the right investment, you could actually have your entire investment paid back in less than 2 months, and use the next 6-1 year , or longer to mine at full profit.
KNC Titan @ $10k x 3 = $30,000 USD. 300 MH/s x 3 = 900 MH/s give or take, let's say you get 875 MH/s. 875 MH/s @ the current rates would get you roughly 85 LTC per day. Let's say the exchange rate is $10, that's around $850 per day you'll be grossing. Including power, and other potential misc costs, you'd be looking to break even in about 45 days.
2 things to consider there as well, 1st off, Litecoin's difficulty while it's shot up quite a bit in the last month is still very reasonable. 2nd, LTC is at the lowest price it's been at in about a year now. If you believe it rise again, then you can do the math and see how this can become fairly profitable. It's not hard to make some nice bank when you can cover your initial investment in the 1st 30-45 days.
