Having said that, I can't really find too many examples of where buying a miner earns you more than buying the coins. BTC dropped to $560, it's even cheaper to buy now, makes more sense than 2 weeks ago to buy as opposed to mine unless you plan on solo mining.
Unfortunately the idea that miners should just trade has never been a goer. Its a bit like telling a crack head they should just sell crack instead of using it.
As for turning off mining rigs.
I have this feeling that the bigger established mining farms are struggling themselves to survive with the massive increase in difficulty which hasn't been the result this time of them all incrementally increasing their hashrates as appears to be the case in the past, but rather it appears to be the result of lots of new mining farms coming online and taking away a large chunk of others earnings.
I assume then that these established farms will now be hoping for a drop off of the part of the network hashrate that exists because of home mining and just may be trying to hang in there until this happens.
I wonder what would happen if we just didn't turn our miners off when they cease turning a profit, and just kept on mining even if there was no ROI but just enough turn around of BTC to pay the power bill.
Especially those in the northern hemisphere who are heading toward fall, and could subsidise their mining costs by using them as heat sources throughout fall, winter and spring.
That might just be the proverbial straw that breaks the camels back in the next 3 - 5 months as the big farms continue their little stand-off waiting for some section of the hashing network to break first.
It would be a gamble that could have little to no affect, but it might be worth considering.
Who said anything about trading. I said just buy BTC for $560. When you buy a miner you're doing the same thing in a roundabout way with risk/benefit of variable ROI.
