I'd like to ask the users here about how you got started in bitcoins and how you acquire bitcoins.
So the two questions are:
1. When you started, did you MINE or did you BUY bitcons?
2. If you are a regular user of bitcoins currently, do you MINE or do you BUY bitcoins?
when i started with bitcoin solo mining was at its end of days, so i never tried mining.
as far as cloudmining goes, i never trusted any service nor found any of them being profitable. in any case i just played around in CEX.IO with small amounts and mostly traded hash rather than mining

my coins come from whatever i could buy with money and the rest is earned through different works like signature campaign, faucets and nowadays trading.