My estimate from the past was that its better to hodl the coins in an uptrend and upgrade miners on a downtrend, but after looking at all the data and running simulations, I'm not really seeing that as clear.
This is more like it, at least based on my own experience, when the mania of a bull market starts it's always better to hold the coin, buying the gear should have been done prior to that, mining works best against hodl when
BTC is not doing much (sideways market) when holding the coin makes you no profit in
BTC nor fiat, but mining generates passive
BTC during that time.
Think about the guy who paid 0.5
BTC to buy S19 pro a couple of months ago, he is far from making that 0.5
BTC today, he will probably never get there, S19 pro gets 0.0022
BTC a month and it's only going to go down, current ROI estimation is 22 months and it can't get any better but can get a lot worse.
There is so much logic involved, a simple way to look at it is by going back to the 2017 era, while the price did hit 20k it only lasted above 10k for two months (Dec 2017 - Jan 2018) so those who bought their mining gears based on 15k or 20k profitability were not in a great financial situation, the super bull cycle is very short-lived, if bitcoin price goes to 100k by April, with coins in your hand you can sell for 100k, your miner, on the other hand, will only be able to utilize that for a few weeks or months before going back to the median price range, of course, this is based on the assumption that we all agree that the price won't go up forever and it will have 2-4 months peak before dipping 50% to stay there for 1-2 years, all previous cycles behaved the same.
I know many of you don't believe in charts but bear with me for a minute.
You can see that since
BTC passed the 30$ level in 2013, it remained within a very neat channel of growth, what's interesting about it is the 3 different colored zones, the red zone represents the peak of each cycle,
BTC has only stayed in that red zone for a bit less than 10% of the duration of its existence, it stayed in the yellow zone for 20% of the time, and was in the green lower zone for 70% of the time.
You may say this time is different, Elon musk is here, mastercard is going to process crypto, you can come up with all theories that say "this time is different", but on the scale of probability, chances are "this time is not different", which suggests that we are getting very close to the top before heading back to the red zone a lot faster than most people would expect.
Now back to mining, IMO you want to buy gears in the green area coming from yellow, that's when prices have fallen over 50-80%, grama is selling her gears for cheap on Ebay because she can't afford the bill and she thinks bitcoin is going to zero, the mining board of the forum is very quiet and no youtube adds of how to have a 2x hashrate on your miner.
When going out from the yellow entering the red, you want your assets to be as liquid as possible, you want to sell near the top, get rid of some of your miners for premium, sit back, relax and wait to accumulate more efficient gears at a much cheaper price a few months later.
Buying gear near the red zone means you paid for the gears based on the assumption that we will stay in the yellow-red for a very long period of time, it's the reason why people now pay incredibly high prices for mining gears that they will receive many months later.
Buying geas now means you are doing exactly what noobs are doing, go check Facebook, telegram, and the hardware market place in this forum, EVERYONE wants to buy mining gear, everyone wants to be rich, everyone thinks it's worth paying 12k for an S19 pro because it will be making them over $100 daily when bitcoin goes to 200k and stays there forever.
