He should have bought bitcoin instead of buying miners. Stuff like these is the reason why I don't recommend mining to anybody. Mining with a GPU rig or two is fine but when it gets "too big", then the real problems will start. Why suffer the headache with mining when you can just buy crypto and chill? This don't make one bit of sense to me.
Risk hedging. When you mine you constantly produce income, even if BTC vs USD goes down in price you still have a chance to make the money back, whereas if you just hold the coin you bear the price fluctuation risks.
In 2018-2019 nobody knew it's all gonna turn out the way it did, so the people who bought BTC at higher prices sold it all at low prices.
But some of the people who bought mining equipment were able to make the money back and had no losses.
