Actually if you mine zec or sigt or skein on nicehash and auto convert to btc then buying eth and holding the eth,
you will earn more then mining and holding eth if you have 1080ti's
there are exceptions but that is pretty much the facts.
A lot depends on how many cards but mining zec skein and sigt have worked better for the most part.
I think my point was missed. Chasing after a hot coin to convert to a "stable" coin is gambling just as much as mining the "stable" coin and holding.
What happens when Sigt has a flash crash and you are left holding a bag of now less worthwhile coins? Mining with a single 1080ti on Equihash at Nicehash will require you to wait 14 days to generate enough BTC to allow them to pay out. Sure you can have more GPUs to decrease that wait period but you aren't in control of your income, you are depending on the "market" at Nicehash to deliver. Plus you pay 4% to transfer out to your external wallet from Nicehash. No thanks.
By no means am I advocating mining ETH with a 1080ti... but people have their legitimate reasons. Mostly because they don't want to have to babysit their rigs chasing a hot coin, dealing with new versions of miners, compiling from source or just trusting that newbie posting who claims an extra 3% hashrate increase,or lose tons of profit in autoconversion schemes, conversion fees, transfer fees, etc.
I wish I could retire and watch rigs all day chasing after the "next big thing". I envy you Philip.
Nobody missed your silly point. You still need to mine a minimum amount of eth before you can cash out, you can join pools that pay sooner. There is no next best thing to constantly chase if you dont want to. There is good old reliable fallback options such as zec and skien. These have been consistently paying 30-50% more than ETH. No one was chasing around after them, 5 minutes a day if you need to change your miners to something else. Otherwise you just have a alert on your phone to make sure they don't lose profitability.
That leaves you around 20 mins now and then to see if anything interesting comes along. If it does you might spend an hour or two getting it going on all rigs. But when it is something like SIG that lasted a month it is well well worth it. Unfortunately I was lazy and let it sit for a few days, if I wasn't it could have easily been 100$ a day.
Point is you don't have to do much chasing to mine the most valuable coin and the reasons people mine ETH and hold it hoping it will go up is because they are lazy, uninformed or have no idea what they are doing.
I have a bunch of friends like that, they are all of those things above plus as you say have limited time. But once I showed them the way they are kicking themselves for all those missed profits.