Buying any hardware before the halving is just a big unnecessary risk in my eyes. Best case is you get to mine for 2 weeks on the gravy train and then everybody else catches up. Nice, you just made probably less than $100 more than somebody who had no risk of the halving. (claps)
With increased risk comes possible increased profit. It is not a sure bet in any means, mining is getting harder and need cheaper electricity. But if price rises (and it depends how high it goes) getting rewards before having could be much more profit. I would guess it's more then 100 and in the hundreds... how many hundreds hard to say though.
We just don't know it is hard to say how much btc hopefully will go up to. But in this game it is normally the ones that take a little risk that profit. If you are looking for a sure bet not sure mining has been that for a while. But I know many people including I have managed to do it and enjoy it very much.
The price of BTC going up has no impact on profitability. We are talking BTC ROI. If I rely on BTC increase to fiat ROI, I could have simply held the coin and made pure profit on the increase with none of the risk associated with mining. I can buy this miner for ~$2,200 today and have it return 2.5 BTC in a year. Or I could buy 2.5 BTC today for $1,450...
The only variable affecting BTC ROI besides downtown and power is network difficulty. I see no scenario in which difficulty allows this miner to ROI. BTC in < BTC out. There is no high risk, high reward. Only imoossible ROI, donation to Bitmain.
I'm not sure how you don't see BTC price impacting mining. It HIGHLY can impact it. I have X operating cost in USD per machine per month in electricity. The longer the BTC stay's above that amount to run the longer I can mine. Eventually.. I have to sell my miners as I do not have "free" electricity.
I see your point of buying 1 BTC = 1 BTC a year later even. But BTC price highly impacts me as far as how long I can mine profitable.