Why do you even line up to buy miners in the first place?
If you believe that a coin has a future just buy it. Unless it is mineable with the stuff everybody can purchase anywhere in the world, it doesn't make a bit of sense to buy specialized mining hardware. That's the most stupid investment one can make. You are basically buying highly advanced calculators. The more people buy them, the more worthless they'll become. See where i am getting at?
HDD mining, GPU mining are OK. ASIC mining is not. It is cancer to crypto world. Don't buy this shit.
Lower risk then investment, if you pay attention to the fundimentals.
As a specific example, my A2 farm achieved 100% ROI sometime LAST YEAR - despite Scrypt coins all being pretty much flat over the timeframe between when I bought them and when they paid themselves off.
If I had "invested" in Litecoin instead of buying those miners, I'd have LOST money (though not a lot) over that entire timeframe - instead, I have quite a bit earned and my A2 farm is STILL pulling in serious profits, to the tune right now of about 30% of my investment into them per month NET AFTER ELECTRIC USAGE.
You can't COUNT on a "skyrocket" happening.
Looking at the last 5 months is 20/20 hindsight that "investing" would have paid off more than mining as there was NO WAY to predict that almost all altcoins would jump so high so fast, and therefore stating that investing is BETTER based on that period is a strawman argument - and as it happens us miners STILL made a ton, and are positioned for the FUTURE to make a ton more with long since paid off gear.
Also, you're not investing in a SINGLE coin - all ASIC based miners can mine multiple coins - though they can't mine as wide a range of coins as GPUs can, they CAN mine more different coins than exist for HDD mining AND have a higher rate of return even over the last few months. BURST in particular has been getting hammered so hard by the various attacks on it's infrastructure and the resulting crash in coin price that it's bloody near impossible to pay off a HD used to mine it with before the drive DIES - which is NOT the general case for ASIC miners.
You should also keep in mind that the landscape of mining hit a major change when Bitmain released the S9 - for the first time, mining ASIC are running on the CURRENT SEMICONDUCTOR STATE OF THE ART. You're not looking at a few months between generations any more, you're looking at YEARS before a new generation of semiconductor tech will make current ASIC miners outdated and uncompetative.
I also fail to understand how you can be so down on ASIC and so up on GPU for mining, they both do the same thing but the GPU is LESS EFFICIENT at it.
