I'm sick of people saying to just buy and hold. I don't want to buy and hold. I want to mine. I'm not gonna buy any miners with USD. I want to take the BTC I'm earning, and buy more hardware to earn even more BTC. Power efficiency is very important, as I want to be running these things for years. And all everyone can say is "BUY BUY BUY!" Gets old after a while.
The simple problem is that the network difficulty is rising fast enough to make long term mining, with current hardware, impossible.
I will also point out that by "long term" I mean 1 year. Yes the term "long term" has changed for Bitcoin in the past 6 months.
Just ignoring what is supposed to come online in the next 60 days, the last 10 difficulty changes have an average of over 20%, the last 4 an average of over 30%
If KnC succeeds and delivers 1PH - 5PH (no one seems to know what their order book adds up to) then that will represent a 100% to 500% increase in the next couple of month, so should easily continue the 30% diff changes and possibly have a very high one somewhere in the middle if they ship a lot of hardware in a 1 week period - since it would seem that shipping a lot of their hardware might simply be putting it into their own datacentre and switching it on.
Almost all ASIC hardware you can see today is priced such that you will lose BTC or only get very little BTC return above what you paid in BTC.
However, most of that pricing is also assuming little or no network increase, which is blatantly, obviously incorrect
The possible large network increases (like KnC) will ensure that beyond any doubt you will not get back your BTC outlay, if they do occur.
So indeed it would appear that buying BTC is the least risk option at the moment - or more correctly, almost certain to lose you less BTC - since almost no mining equipment will gain you BTC above the BTC you pay for it, and all mining equipment will delay that return for many months and cost you some amount of money to run it for many months.