mine a Bitcoin or buy a bitcoin？

[Welsh]

With how volatile things are today, I think mining is not worth it much anymore unless you have a very large budget.  You have so many things to take into account.  Mining rigs are limited.  GPU's (Bitcoin is not GPU mineable by default but I am putting this here just for the sake of the argument) have volatile stock and prices.  Electricity costs are also volatile, but mostly increasing.  There are some countries pulling out the crackdown card on mining.  You need maintenance for your rigs.  You have to know what you are doing and, last but not least, you have to pay electricity which is pretty much like exchanging electricity for Bitcoin and your equipment will need upgrade every now and then.

Or organisations. I know of a few which basically rent a place, and chuck a lot of miners into the space. If you have the budget, then mining is almost guaranteed money, of course as long as you believe in Bitcoin. For the nerds comment you might be right, the difficulty, and the recent volatility has probably made that even more true. Mining used to be relatively easy to get into, and make a profit a year ago. That's no longer the case.

Mining requires a significant initial budget, that a lot of people would prefer to invest straight into buying Bitcoin rather than mining, especially with the difficultly, and the fact that a lot of mining devices aren't readily available to watch.

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[maydna]

If you have the money, you are better buying bitcoin directly on the market than buying hardware for mining or even joining cloud mining. It is not recommended to join cloud mining because there is already a lot of cloud mining which eventually becomes a scam.

In addition, the cost of buying hashrate in cloud mining is also high and does not guarantee whether the company will stay online or run away. Especially if you decide to buy hardware to mine bitcoin because besides being expensive, you also have to be patient so you can collect big rewards. You also have to consider how much electricity costs you will have to pay later.

[sunsilk]

There's this calling that you may want to help the network validating it and be one of the miners out there. But you know, it's costly to have those ASIC miners so, it's better to buy and have it directly with a purchase.

But if you have the budget and assemble a mining farm in your place, do it. That's one of the biggest plan but I don't know if I'll be able to have it someday and even in altcoins to mine and sell it for bitcoin.

I want to have that someday but I know my capacity as of the moment and buying is the easiest choice.

[arwin100]

In fact, you can invest Bitcoin quantitatively every day. You only need to invest once to obtain long-term returns. As long as your machine is up and running, it generates a certain amount of bitcoins every day, and the benefits are endless. Acquiring bitcoins this way does not require you to watch the price every day, wait for the price to rise later, and directly trade in cash. Relatively speaking, cloud mining is the lowest cost.

Although the return of buying currency is high, the risk and return coexist, so investors also need to bear the risk of the currency price falling. And mining money is drought and flood guarantee. As an investor, we should take a long-term view of mining machine production.

Invest on what on ponzi schemes hiding on the name of cloudmining? Better not to go with that option because you cannot get anything but getting scam by them.

Also if you think about hardware mining you need to consider a lot of things and your major concern there if your electricity cost is so high then most provably that you cannot gain anything on this.

[BitcoinPanther]

In fact, you can invest Bitcoin quantitatively every day. You only need to invest once to obtain long-term returns. As long as your machine is up and running, it generates a certain amount of bitcoins every day, and the benefits are endless. Acquiring bitcoins this way does not require you to watch the price every day, wait for the price to rise later, and directly trade in cash. Relatively speaking, cloud mining is the lowest cost.

I thought you are referring about actual bitcoin mining where a person buy a rig/asic, set it up connect to the mining pool and mine bitcoin, but then it turns out you are promoting cloud mining.  I do not think it is the lowest cost because you need to top up or buy extra hashes as time goes by to compete with the shares on the pool.  Aside from that, buying hashes on cloud mining services had been proven not profitable and have the highest risk of being a scam. 

I would go for buying Bitcoin than mining because it is the most efficient way to acquire Bitcoin.  No maintenance, no noise, no huge electric bill.

[KaliLinux]

If what you are referring to mining here is cloud mining, which is how I understood it, never mind. Although I have heard of the likes of ViaBTC and NiceHash and Genesis and others and a handful are vouching them, the bottom line has always been that cloud mining is either (1) outright scam or Ponzi or (2) that it is not a good investment or (3) the terms and conditions of these cloud mining companies are obviously unfair which means everything is only advantageous to them and highly disadvantageous to their clients.

So if you want to get into Bitcoin mining by way of cloud mining, you'd better buy Bitcoin and HODL.

Couldn't have agreed more. Cloud mining is one place I wouldn't even advise anyone to invest in cos this is just a 100% risk considering you don't even have control of anything, if I wanted to rally go for mining then it would have been me having my own mining rig that's If I can afford the whole set up, however, I would rather just invest that amount into Buying Bitcoin directly and hodling them for when the time is right to take profits and don't worry about the power in terms of mining. 

[The Cryptovator]

For me, it is better to buy Bitcoin rather than mine, because first of all my government does not allow to use of Bitcoin. So definitely they will not allow to mine Bitcoin and the electricity bill is too high to set up mining equipment. I think it is better for me to accumulate Bitcoin when it is on dip all although we don't know the exact deep at least we have a target where we can enter into that.

[aquafinewater]

In both options I,m selecting buying Bitcoin because it's easier for everyone if we focus on mine Bitcoin then we face many issue like Bitcoin mining ban in mostly countries and also we need a huge budget for mining so buying Bitcoin is best way for profit

[cheezcarls]

If I only knew Bitcoin a decade ago, I would be doing whatever it takes to mine as much as I can. But now that mining is now getting difficult for every halving period passing by, I'll just simply do DCA (dollar cost averaging) with Bitcoin with my extra "not beer money".

But of course, it really depends on whichever works for you because both methods are still subject to certain risks in the financial side that you definitely need to acknowledge.

[adzino]

In general, there are two ways to acquire bitcoins: buying them with real money or "mining" them. The process of mining is the process of acquiring bitcoin, and therefore mining is mining for coins.

So let's start with buying coins. Many people think that buying currency is like buying stocks. The threshold is low and anyone can buy it directly. In addition, they believe that the cost of buying coins is low, so they only need to pay the money to buy coins. But buying currency such as investing in stocks, the income is also big risk, you buy currency in the hand, the price of the currency rises you earn, the price of the currency falls you compensate. And the early need to do a lot of homework, which is similar to buying stocks, which requires you to understand the background of the investors all kinds of information, need to in-depth understanding of all kinds of basic information, according to their own cognition to make choices.

In fact, you can invest Bitcoin quantitatively every day. You only need to invest once to obtain long-term returns. As long as your machine is up and running, it generates a certain amount of bitcoins every day, and the benefits are endless. Acquiring bitcoins this way does not require you to watch the price every day, wait for the price to rise later, and directly trade in cash. Relatively speaking, cloud mining is the lowest cost.

Although the return of buying currency is high, the risk and return coexist, so investors also need to bear the risk of the currency price falling. And mining money is drought and flood guarantee. As an investor, we should take a long-term view of mining machine production.

If you are newbie or don't have much time, you are better of investing on bitcoin and holding it for long term. Mining requires maintenance and you need to know what you are doing. And you will need to spend money on the equipment, electricity and other stuffs. On other hand, buying bitcoin is so much easier. You pay, you receive your coins, you hold and then you sell.

You shouldn't be promoting cloud mining. Like 99.9% of them are scam.

[Fivestar4everMVP]

Sorry, but I think your perspective to the difference between buying bitcoin and mining bitcoin is wrong, there are no guarantees of profiting in both adventures.
The same way a user who buys bitcoin with money could be in loss if the price of bitcoin goes down, is the same way a user who mined bitcoin could be in loss if the mining difficulty is too high, and the money spent on electricity is higher than what the bitcoin mined is worth at the time.
So there is the possibility of profiting and also losing money on both the user that buys bitcoin and the user that mine bitcoin.

Acquiring bitcoins this way does not require you to watch the price every day, wait for the price to rise later, and directly trade in cash.

Mining bitcoin as an individual can only be profitable if the user stays or live in an area where ~

• 1. There is constant electricity in other to power the mining machine and keep it running 24/7.
• 2. Electricity bills are very low, based on how bitcoin mining consumes power, if one stays in an area where electricity bills are high, you discover that by the end of the day, you will end up spending all what could have been your profit on paying electricity bills.
• 3. Government has not place a ban on Bitcoin mining, that is, staying in an area where Bitcoin mining is legal or the government have not taken a stand on it yet.

Relatively speaking, cloud mining is the lowest cost.

But you stand at a whooping 90 to 95 percent of being a victim of cloud mining scam, over 90 percent of all cloud mining platforms that exist today are being run by scammers.

And mining money is drought and flood guarantee. As an investor, we should take a long-term view of mining machine production.

As I said earlier, there is no guarantee of profiting even in bitcoin mining, I know alot of investors that bought mining rigs to mine bitcoin, and after few months, they sold it because mining is not profitable for them.
Its not just about buying the mining machine, there are several other expense involved, for example ~
Setting up the mining rig.
Cost of maintaining the rig.
Cost of electricity. Etc.
All this and more are what to put into consideration before deciding on buying a Bitcoin mining machine.

[spectre71]

If you want mining exposure you do some research on investing in one of the mining company stocks. Last time I glanced at them they tracked BTC fairly closely.  Unsure it would be an advantage over owning BTC unless you wanted to get something BTC like into an investment you couldn't get BTC itself into

[isaac_clarke22]

~

Not sure how much ASIC rig costs these days considering that back in 2021, I even struggled to get my GPU for my home use, lol and the prices of it were skyrocketing due to shortages from a lot of factors like scalpers. I would just go for Bitcoin at the end of the day if I was trying to get something to earn some returns from. Couple of months ago, electricity costs were quite awful here in my country so getting a rig would be hella not be worth it even in a single penny.

You also mentioned cloud mining there. I believe that people are seeing the all as 99% scam so I would not even budging any luck there if I was starting to get into Bitcoin.

[Leviathan.007]

We cannot choose an option randomly and it depends on the condition of yourself and your mining situation. Generally, mining can be very much profitable if you have a low electricity cost. But first, you will need to calculate the price of electric power and the maintenance cost, and also the money you need to buy a miner after the calculation of these you will be able to know if mining bitcoin can be profitable for you or buying some. In my situation because of the problems I have in my country the best option can be to buy and hold bitcoin for the long term.

[noormcs5]

If I only knew Bitcoin a decade ago, I would be doing whatever it takes to mine as much as I can. But now that mining is now getting difficult for every halving period passing by, I'll just simply do DCA (dollar cost averaging) with Bitcoin with my extra "not beer money".

But of course, it really depends on whichever works for you because both methods are still subject to certain risks in the financial side that you definitely need to acknowledge.

Why not take the easy path and buy the bitcoin?

Five or six years ago one can think of mining bitcoin at an individual level but these days mining is very costly. I would rather just avoid all complication of mining and buy bitcoin from exchange, transfer it to my personal wallet and that's all 

[budi691]

for now the most you can do is buy, watch the price drop and buy it, that's what most people do, not much can be done especially with cloud mining it's better to avoid it, buy and hold it for later sale at the highest price

[wxa7115]

If what you are referring to mining here is cloud mining, which is how I understood it, never mind. Although I have heard of the likes of ViaBTC and NiceHash and Genesis and others and a handful are vouching them, the bottom line has always been that cloud mining is either (1) outright scam or Ponzi or (2) that it is not a good investment or (3) the terms and conditions of these cloud mining companies are obviously unfair which means everything is only advantageous to them and highly disadvantageous to their clients.

So if you want to get into Bitcoin mining by way of cloud mining, you'd better buy Bitcoin and HODL.

I'm surprised that there are still people interested in cloudmining, because people in this forum have known for a very long time that it is a scam since you're never going to get profits by cloudmining, and anyone that believes otherwise probably doesn't really know what they're talking about.

So taking this into consideration it is very easy to see that between the two options that the OP gives us the best option by far is to buy bitcoin, however buying bitcoin is not enough, people need to learn how to hold their bitcoin as well and keep it for long enough to obtain profits.

[Jeger.Kiting]

Mining Bitcoin is not a very easy thing to understand for a beginner, you really have to look for someone who already understands in the crypto world to tell how to mine and the capital is very large for the tools needed, not only that, you also have to compete with miners others who already have very large and adequate tools, so it is very difficult to get Bitcoin in a very short time and takes quite a long time. So if you have a large capital, it is better to buy Bitcoin for long term investment so that you can benefit from your investment compared to mining Bitcoin.

[maydna]

~

Not sure how much ASIC rig costs these days considering that back in 2021, I even struggled to get my GPU for my home use, lol and the prices of it were skyrocketing due to shortages from a lot of factors like scalpers. I would just go for Bitcoin at the end of the day if I was trying to get something to earn some returns from. Couple of months ago, electricity costs were quite awful here in my country so getting a rig would be hella not be worth it even in a single penny.

You also mentioned cloud mining there. I believe that people are seeing the all as 99% scam so I would not even budging any luck there if I was starting to get into Bitcoin.

I heard that the rig's cost is very expensive because the price of one VGA is also very expensive. After all, good stuff for mining bitcoin is expensive and hard to get. Meanwhile, buying hardware specifically for mining bitcoin is also expensive because that's the hardware we have to buy if we want a hefty reward. He also has to think about the cost of electricity as I said before and if in his country the cost of electricity is very high, it is not recommended to mine bitcoins.

Yes, you are right. Today's cloud mining has become a lot of fraud and under the pretext that it can provide huge profits, it's all a lie.

[ethereumhunter]

for now the most you can do is buy, watch the price drop and buy it, that's what most people do, not much can be done especially with cloud mining it's better to avoid it, buy and hold it for later sale at the highest price

The current bitcoin decline could be the best time to buy bitcoins instead of mining bitcoins because bitcoin mining is now difficult for people who don't have enough money to buy hardware and pay other fees. So it would be better if they don't mine bitcoin but just buy it so that it will reduce other costs that they can use for additional capital to buy bitcoin. But if they still want to try to mine bitcoins, that's up to them because we can only give them advice.