the FUTURE
Proof of stake buy the coin from the exchange, transfer to personal wallet and let Stake, Easy and done.Proof of Work ,
1. Buy a warehouse
2. Spend 1 million dollars buying ASICS
3. Spend thousand of dollars on electricity & IT Support Staff
4. Setup Website and system so others can buy shares into your BTC mining operation, because you make more money from the suckers that buy cloud mining than you do from mining BTC itself.
(If that does not make a lightbulb in your head Light up, well there's no hope for you.)
5. Pray for a Miracle , so the next halving does not end your Business models , because you can't afford to keep upgrading the ASICS There is no Proof of Stake coin, that I cannot enter at this point in time.
You could not enter the BTC mining for less than ~1 million bucks.
this is what ... common sense?
the current BTC model is exactly as kiklo states above:
mine (HODL)
pump/dump get $
buy the newest ASIC tech, expand dominance in #/blocks earned/day
pray and hope your multimillion$ mine farm out survives the competition for the next hype cycle
[repeat]
and we are at the Nth stage, you can only compete in China or Iceland or Washington St. (read cheapest cost to run and cool your peta flops on EARTH) ... it ... is ... DONE ... unless someone discovers bigger rivers to dam ... end game is here
SMART money is jumping onto the NXT 2.0 train out of Satoshi Town
BTC mining is going to go thru a very bloody consolidation of profitable operations (some time in the next 8 years)
The market will dump, as it was designed, redistribute, and accumulate into the hands of fools silly enough to grab at a $7B knife falling.
---
the likely evolution is for ASIC to operate co-currently as a mine and supercomputer
so ETH but with partitioning and ASIC P/H power!
the engines powering BTC will burn out (else need to seriously be reduced in operating costs)
if the eggheads must have a $1M/day hashing machine ... they better act fast and invent their own ETH