As a miner, why do you mine rather than buy and hold?

[Eric Mu]

I constantly get told that it makes more sense to buy and hold than mine yourself - wondering what is your experience as miners.

[acarli]

When bitcoin first hit 160/Btc I had 60GH/s ASIC miner. At the time it cost about $1200. I made my money back in 45 days. I sold the bitcoins to recuperate the investment and let the machine mine until the cost of electricity costs more that the value of the mining. I made another $1000 throughout the next 4 months. Each month it kept going down.

Looking back, if I purchased the bitcoins outright, and held I would have made more. The experience was worth it. I learned a lot and do not regret it. realize that there are risks. Down time and failure will certainly top the scales. I also didn't like the noise and heat.

I think it depends on the person, if that makes any sense.

[BitcoinBarrel]

I made a small profit in 2014-2015 buying a used GPU off craigslist, mining alt-coins and selling for BTC.

It all depends on the opportunity and if it's profitable or not. Usually it is not 

[BigBoom3599]

Even though I think it's less profitable than buying and holding, I think a lot of people mine so they can have a vote in which software they think should run the Bitcoin network (Core, Classic, Unlimited, ...)

[CjMapope]

as of the last few years i find buying and holding, over mining.

Theres literally ZERO places to get a simple ASIC, SHA or Scrypt, Bitmains machines are literally garbage, and with their just being no competition to the cheap power of china,  the community is left behind, i know i would mine if i COULD, but i CANT, not BTC.

Theres also no cloud mining providers that arent the surest way to lose your money either. Not that they do it on purpose, difficulty is a bitch, but they offer no upgrade or continuation options, almost like they were waiting to terminate the contract and leave you with less than you began with :/

GREED, DIFFICULTY, OTHERS CHEAP POWER = BUY BTC>MINING BTC

[gueorguiev]

I no longer mine, but when I did,it was with my BFL Jalapeno 10GH that I luckily got pretty early on.I managed to mine around 3 BTC before the profit diminished to a point not worth mining. I think the idea of buying a machine that was pretty new technology at the time, and having it work to generate Bitcoin in ways that i still hadn't really understood was just fascinating to me. Anyone can buy and hold, but where's the fun in that. I wanted to be apart of the action,not sit on the sidelines.

Though the times have changed. The days of Solo mining are over in my opinion, cloud mining is a joke, and the only options left are buy and hold or trade.

[Xester]

I constantly get told that it makes more sense to buy and hold than mine yourself - wondering what is your experience as miners.

I was once a miner, and I do mine using my equipments (antminer s5) then I shifted to mining rentals and to online mining sites. In my experience it is good to buy and hold when a coin is new or during ICO. Its easier to grab or hold a coin at a very low price than to mine it which very time-consuming.

But since I am not a pro in mining this is all that I could share, but I dont know the story of the big time miners, maybe for them its a different story.

Well in the meantime if you are mining, do not sell all your mined coins at the same time but instead hold some of them and wait for them to increase in price that way you will earn surely.

[gueorguiev]

I was once a miner, and I do mine using my equipments (antminer s5) then I shifted to mining rentals and to online mining sites.

Hey I actually thought about getting an Antminer s5 a few months ago but opted out because of the halving, and cloud mining just made no sense no matter what kind of math I threw at it. Just wondering what kind of experience you had with those two, did you/are you still making any profit off either.

[xuan87]

mining used to be a very profitable but after the halving it is really difficult to earn and beside of that we need to know every possible way to earn bitcoin, it used to be more profitable in mining rather than buy and hold, but now it is better to buy and hold, it is easier

[veleten]

buying and holding is easier,more profitable and generally recommended for the ones who are relatively new to mining and bitcoin in general
but there is a particular group of people who mine not only for profit
it is a sort of a hobby,opportunity to be a part of the community etc.
a friend of mine runs an s5 with 0.08 cents/kWh electricity tariff,not sure he is getting any return after electricity costs
when asked why the hell,he simply answered because I want to be a bitcoin miner

[socks435]

I think it is depends if you have lots of money to buy bitcoins but it takes long time that you can gain a profit and it is risky because there is no assurance that the price will keep increase.. so for me it is better to mine bitcoins than buy and hold..
Because you can gain a bitcoin and you can save it for a long time. or sell it in the right time that can gives you more profit while you are holding..
Also you can gain more profit that get your capital back in mining..

[DimensionZ]

Some people mine for the experience and because they find it fun even though it's not as profitable as buying cryptos and holding until the price is right. I haven't used desktop computers for more than a decade and when I found out about Bitcoin I tried to figure out mining on my own and tried some on an AMD-based laptop I had at the time. I wasn't in it for the money but for the experience and to understand how things worked. I guess most of the casual miners are like that.

[target]

i do not mine myself but if i have the miner i would i just don't have the access to buy asic devices. mining it a lot profitable, they can mine and hold. its better than buying and hold.

[MCWey8]

For the blinkenlights !


IT pro, homelabber  ..  like having networked hardware, servers, switches, kinda a natural progression to mining.

[Zadicar]

I constantly get told that it makes more sense to buy and hold than mine yourself - wondering what is your experience as miners.

There are really people would like to mine since they have the capacity to put investments on it and even some are always claiming that mining isnt profitable already people would still continue because they treat it just like a hobby and would like to experience mining and dont like to purchase bitcoin itself.

[leowonderful]

It's more fun in my opinion and you can use miners for lottery mining after you hit roi. You also get decent resell for your miners after you decide you don't want them anymore. Holding is pretty boring and takes time.

[YuginKadoya]

There are many people that are buying and holding bitcoin than mining it because of the hard time yo need to accumulate while mining, the Rigs are very expensive, the electric cost you can make with just one miner, problem with space and place you should put it, the noise it emits will certainly cause neighbor disturbance Whether conditions and the internet speed issues in your country that is why it is better for other people in buying and waiting for the value to sky rocket,

But the best part in mining if you consider the said problems above and you got some capital in buying your Rigs, no electricity cost, great place with no neighbors to disrupt and a great internet speed then you can surely ROI and had an ongoing bitcoin production.

[btczar]

I constantly get told that it makes more sense to buy and hold than mine yourself - wondering what is your experience as miners.

I stopped mining with my own hardware when I saw that I would be in possession of much more bitcoin than I had, if I had just kept it, instead of risking it with mining. Yes I eventually got my ROI, in terms of the value of the miners when bought vs the value of the bitcoin I mined, but the total amount of BTC used to buy, vs the total amount of BTC mined, was not always correct. I got ROI many times on the fiat value, but not always on the BTC value. Now I only hold....but I am always looking to see if its still possible to make a profit mining again...

[Raimonn]

I stoped mining bitcoins because the scaling on difficulty made my hardware outdated, i bought a bit more on bitcoins and now i hold them. I would like to mine again (if i find a cheap second hand miner) but electricity cost on my country make it near impossible.

[QuintLeo]

For folks with a low cost of electric, it's usually a LOT more profitable to mine with and lower risk vs buy and hold.

I'd HATE to have been one of those folks that bought at the Bitcoin peak when it was well over $1000 - they STILL haven't recouped their investment after years....

On the other hand, buy in when it was in the under $300 range would have been pretty profitable at this point.