Miners don't care about coins
That's true since you don't need anything other than pointing your hardware at a multipool but if miners did care they would earn much, much more money than they currently do.
This used to be true, I'm not so sure about anymore. There is no aggregate place to go to to learn about new coins and talk about them. Bitcointalk is huge and easy to lose random shit in it unless you spend tons of time searching through it to find new coins that are promising. There used to be big pool sites, like suchpool and dedicatedpool where you could essentially find big promising coins that are 'hyped' and mine them. Now they've been reduced to almost nothing or simply closed.
The day and age of big mining seems to pretty much be over unless BTC increases in a couple hundred. PoS has also helped give miners the final push out the door.
That being said 'holding' on coins has done nothing except lose me money. Everytime a coin starts to drop, occasionally it'll get a bounce, but any major dump is usually the end for it as confidence is lost and people move on to 'more promising' coins. I think I only had one coin where holding actually was beneficial, Gorillacoin.
This is generally why things have broken down into multipools and cloudmining aggregates. Becaues you essentially have two jobs here. Finding coins that are profitable to mine and providing a mining service. Both take a decent chunk of time. If you're already spending time finding niche coins to mine, you don't need hardware as you can purchase hashrate on something like Nicehash and since you can purchase on Nicehash, how much money you're losing by not mining isn't applicable as there is a direct correlation to the amount of good coins that are currently being mined. You're essentially not gaining anything extra by mining yourself unless mining power isn't available (like NIST5 for instance).
You could make a full time job JUST out of watching the market, especially if you're holding a few different coins, let alone finding new ones. I personally have a lot invested in one small coin and that itself still takes a decent chunk of time.
once again ...
i personally can vouch for that ...
its why in a few weeks im personally taking a full time interest in it ...
#crysx
You'll need it. Fending for scraps and riding on the coat tails of a roller coaster each and every day. I guess if you live in a third world country or one where wages aren't very high, mining is still promising compared to working for Foxcon or Apple, but not in the US. You need more then pennies to make something worth your time.
Mining itself isn't where the money is, the money is in finding coins and purchasing hashpower, and even more so in just playing the market.
there are quite a few points which you have made that makes sense in the minds of people that have no experience nor push to get the experience ...
then again - you make sense on a few points also - that require one to have some sort of experience to comment by ...
mining itself is not a 'big deal' any more - but who said that one needs to mine to make money? ...
besides - where the hell do you think places like nicehash / westhash or mintsy GET 'their' hashpower from? ...
leasing hashpower WHILE one mines WHILE one trades WHILE looks for ( and accrues promising ) coins makes a great deal of sense to me ...
apart from the coin / money side - who on earth says we do it for the coin or money? ...
its knowledge that i thirst for ... knowledge that makes it worth every cent - every coin - every sweat and tear ...
knowledge - and knowledge only ...
i may be one of those people that never becomes famous in any sense ( nor would i want to be ) ... but i can assure you that when the cards are down or up - people like myself will be the ones pulling the strings ... in the background ...
it seems that you are not seeing one very valuable factor here when you state that i 'need' to be able to do this full time ... i can assure you quite emphatically that i dont ...
this fact is as simple as abc - yet you dont see it ... this fact is as exposed and protruding as a dogs proverbials' - yet you dont seem to see it ...
this fact is i dont NEED to do this full time because i WANT to do this full time because i can AFFORD to do it full time because of the KNOWLEDGE that has been accrued over the time that i have been doing this and the EXPERIENCE it has given me ...
i am not the only one in this league - and there are many others in a league of their own ... those that are much more capable of making things happen in the market than you can give credit to ...
essentially - its about what YOU as a person is interested in ...
for me and mine - its about the understanding and application of the knowledge that you accrue - even at the cost of monetary gains ...
knowledge is power - knowledge is king ...
needing 'more then pennies to make something worth your time' ? ...
i guess its all about how valuable you perceive your time to be - and i dont mean on a simple monetary value ...
im in australia - far from a third world country ... yet i choose to make this a full time commitment for the sake of education - and the pursuit of something more than just a couple of dollars for my mining effort ...
as ive always said - in anything you do ... never go into something that you cant afford to lose ... and always have fun - win OR lose ...
to each their own i guess ...
#crysx