I wanted to share a story with you all. It's August of 2017 and I believe it "IS" still profitable to mine scrypt from home on a budget. I chronicle the whole thing on my blog (http://mybtcjourney.com) but I want to give you the highlights.

Recently I set up a test mining rig at home based off a Raspberry Pi configuration. This configuration consisted of:
* 1 Gridseed ASIC Miner I bought off eBay about 4 years ago
* 1 Raspberry Pi Starter Kit
* CGMiner software for the Raspberry Pi

This entire setup, when mining draws about 11.1 watts of power (including the Gridseed). My electricity rate is about 0.07 per kW/h so that means this rig will cost me $6.74 to run 24x7x365.

According to the chart below, after running for 24 hours I was mining at a rate of approximately 0.00006279 BTC worth of altcoin.

[IMAGE: https://steemitimages.com/DQmexKxKLxLuVv3ngM42hTmcUTLHKkxwFP8J8GToYPy4Y2Q/24-hour-mining-profitability.png]

This means that over a 1 year period, I should be able to mine approximately 0.02291835 BTC worth of altcoin. At the time I did my study, BTC was trading at $1926.27 USD. This means that after a year, I should be able to make $44.14. Not earth shattering money but more than the $6.74 I spent in electricity.

NOTE: As of today, 8/5/2017, BTC is now trading at $3245.88 which means that my current profitability is about $74.39.

Now my plans are to start doing some studies into the various "auto trading" softwares out there. I want to put $100 in USI Tech and $100 in BitConnect and see, at the end of a year, which one is creating more weath for me (completely on autopilot).