RE: Hello Steemians!!! RKD from Seattle Washington :) New and Happy to be here!!
What I have been noticing is that when you mine a coin with a high difficulty such as bitcoin unless you join a pool it will not be profitable. My strategy would be to choose a coin with low difficulty that you think will gain value over time. Right now I am mining out of my house havent got the first electricity bill yet so im not too sure. I have a bunch a very efficient 6gb msi gtx 1060s pumping out 1200 hashrate with each card using around 80w. I have been switching between alt coins as well. I mine Digibyte, Dash, Monero. I would first build one rig with 4-6 cards and get the process started and see the rewards hit your wallet before you make any other decisions since it is a pricey project. Take a look at nice hash miner as well. It automatically mines the coins with the lowest difficulty and converts them into bitcoin for you. https://www.nicehash.com/?p=nhmintro Hope that helped a lil.
I used to be in pools with algorithms detecting which altcoin was more profitable at any time to mine. In the end... I used to have a lot of small quantities of shitcoins I could do nothing with.
It was nice, but lacked of the future perspective you are adding. Mining what you think is going to rise is a very good option.
Were the alt coins converted into bitcoin for you as a service provided by the pool?
No, I had to do it myself.