buy coins or mine them?

[ayayay]

I'm thinking of buying a rig to mine ltc, however seems more profitable to just spend the 2 grand on coins

[suchnoob]

If you choose your investments right, it is.

[EvertonFan]

im not convinced ltc is profitable on gpus now - certainly not small ones...but i've just earnt my first btc from instamining new alts and selling them on exchanges! been mining for about 2 weeks with 2 x r9 280x, so overall not too bad!

[Thom]

Buy coins AND miners.

Use bots to trade coins on exchanges for profit.
Use miners to mine coins then periodically resell miners on ebay to buy faster ones.

And/Or do both by buying coins then using them for cloud mining at cex.io, where you can trade GHS for BTC to profit on the highs and lows, all the while mining in the cloud any time you hold GHS there. More challenging, but potentially profitable if you do it right.

[infofront]

Miners are a ton of work to set up and maintain. A lot of people downplay this.  Also,  there are always hidden costs,  besides electricity, such as hardware failures (in the last month I've fried 2 motherboards and one gpu).

In retrospect, I probably should've just bought coins.

[jongameson]

the only coin worth it long term is Bitcoin.  all other altcoins are worthless

[SpeedDemon13]

You can diversify yourself by investing half in a rig and other half in buying coins.

Build a cheap mining rig with older, but still decent cards. For example, 2x HD 6970's or one HD 6990 + Cheap mobo + Dual core CPU + 4~8 GB RAM + PSU (Most crucial part after the GPU's) + Small HDD/SSD

[El Dude]

the only coin worth it long term is Bitcoin.  all other altcoins are worthless

litecoin is not worthless

[Kenshin]

PLEASE... Buy more bitcoins. We need to see the price of bitcoin goes up again.

[cryptohunter]

the only coin worth it long term is Bitcoin.  all other altcoins are worthless

based upon what reasoning?  i agree longterm BTC will stay number 1, however of course there will be alts that offer something and will have decent value.

After you have 5-20BTC, 1000LTC  in cold storage then get hoard some alts.

[laris2]

the only coin worth it long term is Bitcoin.  all other altcoins are worthless

litecoin is not worthless

Agree with that, litecoin being the altcoin that provides scrypt and possibility to mine for people with gpus not only those who have asics.

[Del137]

Depends on what amount you call @money@  

If like 10-20k $ than you may get asics and mine for BTC, if like 1-2k$ than get rig with videocards and mine... if 1-2kk$ than you hire man who do it all for small salary invest in different coins like EAC, QQC, LTC etc, and sell in right time or over a year...  

[Thom]

If you get a significant scrypt mining rig, a multipool and cryptsy combo will let you mine the most profitable altcoin at multipool, then auto-cashout to cryptsy where you can set it to autosell your altcoin deposits for BTC.

But if your rig/s can't hash fast enough for quick payouts, you'll just be left standing with handfuls of altcoin small change you can't shift fast enough to profit.

It's the most direct and immediate way I know of to consider your scrypt mining in terms of its BTC earning power.

Multipool also totals up the current total BTC value of all your mined altcoins there, and the last few days of dogecoin have been eventful enough to be worth doing this way.

Point a competant gaming PC at it and see how you do, then compare it to hashrates of the big rigs you're considering.

(I've also seen middlecoin but with no domain name, registration or detailed altcoin stats, you can't tell what's going on there as easily and it looks like it's for big scrypt hashers and botnet lords only.)