This is invaluable. Thank you for your response. After reading I do have a ton more questions lol.
I do have an irl friend of many years who is ready to go in 50% with me.
If I am able to get around the first pitfall of receiving the units, maybe by not making a bulk order;
would it/could it be risk cancelling to rent out the mining power, instead of mining coins for ourselves?
Thus ensuring a steady income regardless of bitcoin fluctuating value? (excluding a complete crash and death of the bitcoin, God forbid.)
In bulk amounts that might be hard. You could try
Nicehash, but you can't know that your income will be steady.
You can't really start a cloud mining service, because almost everyone assumes they're scams (99.9% of them are), and you'd have to put a huge amount of work into something that's properly regulated/is legitimate.
As a miner on a large scale, you're essentially a speculator as well. If the price doesn't continue rising, then the difficulty might catch up with the price, at which point mining naturally becomes only just profitable. If the price rises so much that the difficulty flies up, your machines might seem inefficient and you wouldn't get the profits anymore.
For now, you would get profits in ~6 months as Amph points out, but because of the difficulty it's unrealistic to expect that to actually happen. I still think it's a moderately good investment, but you have to appreciate that this is a high risk/high reward choice for you.