For those who do not believe in magic:
Buying the miner is buying Bitcoin over time vs. buying the Bitcoin as a lump sum and holding it. Both are bets that the exchange rate will remain good or improve. Both are long bets on Bitcoin. It is possible to know with certainty which growth rates of difficulty will yield a positive return over a fixed time period and which ones will not.
Of course it is not possible to know at what rate the network will eventually grow at. However, you can build a graph of possible returns and look at what the network hash rate must do in order for an investment in mining equipment to generate a positive return. If the hash rate has to do very unlikely things (like shrink for 6 months) for your investment to generate a positive return, then you shouldn't buy the equipment. If you feel strongly about owning BTC, you should buy them from an exchange.
After the time has passed, you can know what the hash rate did. After the time has passed, you can with certainty know if buying Bitcoin over time was a better investment than buying it as a lump sum from an exchange. Beforehand you can know the probabilities of an investment paying off, like the odds at a blackjack table. Afterwards you know if a hand won or lost, but you can know beforehand if you should have bet on it or not.
Finally! I hope your words will be more clear than mine, because I give up
if you kept btc instead and don't sell till btc goes back to $1 then what?? you always sell at the top? perhaps the buyer kept 70% of their btc as a hedge and used 30% for miners... the 30% would represent higher risk/reward. You can only base that decision at the time it was made. Hindsight does not factor into it. If you knew BFL were morons and still risk the btc then it was dumb move even if you got lucky... if you did research and saw that they are solid company then it is good risk
what happens afterward is just second guessing. only rate the move at the time it was made.
I decided in March that BFL were jackasses so I didn't place a minirig order. I thought Avalon were good, but I didnt have btc for batch #3. Hindsight says I am lucky that I didnt go for avalon batch #3.. but that doesn't mean the move was good. It was lucky. The correct move at that time was to risk on batch #3 from the data available.. but who knew they suck at handling problems and get lazy?
It's interesting this idea of correct moves (if it were a poker game I might agree). I think we have to look at motives as well. I for example placed a small BFL order about 2 months before they stopped selling FPGA - got my 5 units and have cleared ~9000 USD from selling coin they've made (in the last 14 months). I didn't hold any bitcoin (which I regret) simply selling it on a set schedule or whenever I thought the price was good. Except for the bitcoin I used to purchase sc upgrades for my fpga units.
From my perspective, skipping avalon (and asic miner) were wise choices on my part. At this point, with my FPGA stuff about to be upgraded (just 2 more weeks
) I've got ROI of 300%. I also have the side effect of spending btc I mined to purchase pairs of nice video cards for my 3 computers, as well as a gpu rig (and that expense isn't in the numbers I've given here) I later sold the rig, and kept 3 7950s to use on the computers.
All told it's been a fun hobby over the past year... My total investment was less than 3500 USD.
As for your 'luck' in not purchasing avalon batch 3... I chose not to buy avalon because the tech was inferior and I didn't want to support it. I chose not to buy asicminer because the business model would result in a centralization of (imo) too much hash rate in one location if the succeeded (and I think it's bad for bitcoin in general).
I think the mistake a lot of people make is looking at investing as some sort of game of chance, with odds and using hindsight to evaluate decisions. If they'd take a more classical view - everything changes. 10 month ROI is amazing by investment standards. Using standard batch buying and the concept of drawing your investments down... you can ROI much much faster that simply buying miners and waiting for them to earn themselves out.
An example of drawing down a hardware investment is what I did with my GPU rig. I laid out 1800 bucks for the entire system, 5x 7950. I mined with them for about 5 weeks... then I sold 4 of the 5 cards (moved 1 to an existing machine) The left me with ~300 UDS in profit. My timing was good, about a month after I sold them people we suddenly turning of GPUs for bitcoin mining.
You could follow the same strategy with any asic gear, evaluate what it's earnings should be over a shorter time period. Buy much more than you're 'going to keep' and then sell some of the hardware over time so you end up ROI'd after a shorter period of time... on the hardware you have left. It's called risk management.
