Are there modern-day profits?

Yes, there are. Sometimes. If you have a GPU or an ASIC to hash the puzzle and a sufficient heatsink to not blow your hardware, you can mine for cryptocurrency tokens. Apparently, the puzzles are just a way to make sure users don't double-spend and the transactions are legitimate. It takes a lot of juice to update the blockchain, yeah? But mining doesn't mean you'll earn anything. Even though you don't need the whole 64-digit hexadecimal, your likelihood of mining a target hash is increasingly more difficult. Your mining pool might be melting the icecaps for nothing but an orphan block.

Of course, you can use hard currency and buy crypto on an exchange, which seems to me to be a micro-centralized marketplace. This is probably the way to go since personal PCs don't have the power anymore and hashing rigs can eat into your overhead. Either way, there's no guarantee of profits. It depends on the market which depends on how many coins have been mined, halved, or hoarded—or even if it's illegal in your country.

Then there's NFTs. NFTs are unique, non-fungible cryptographic tokens on the blockchain that cannot be exchanged at equivalency. The tokens can represent digital items, including art or personal information; or physical items, like real estate or even loan collateral. The token itself contains access to the metadata of the provinence and asset location.

NFT profitability depends on the market and the item represented by the token. You probably won't earn money if your passport is tokenized, but you might if you're selling someone else's.

Modern-day profits are highly subjective. It may seem trite to say they're only worth what people will pay, but it's true. When it comes to modern-day profits, I turn to the proverb Clive Anderson—the original host of Whose Line Is It, Anyway?—coined and Drew Carey institutionalized: "Everything's made up, and the points don't matter." So, are cryptocurrency or NFTs good investments? Maybe. But I'm no modern-day prophet.

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