But you can't base the full value of the miner on today's exchange rate alone, which is why these predictions don't make sense. You assume the difficulty will continue to rise, yet not the price of bitcoin. This prediction is made in an unrealistic vacuum that isn't applicable to real life, at least not the way that I'm understanding it.\
Yes you can, if you convert that $3000 into BTC TODAY and you hold from that point on in both scenarios you absolutely can. BTC/USD exchange rate is not relevant anymore because we're comparing BTC-BTC at that point.
You're also not factoring in that when you go to resell your miner you will make back a lot of what you originally spent.
I sure was, that's why I said (look at what I put here in bold):
At which point have you actually made 0.2608BTC in each of the 3 scenarios and can you start getting ahead on scenario 2?
In the standard forecast its September, in the pessimistic one its right at the end of the year.
And what we have not done (because were ignoring the next 2 sets of numbers) is add in power cost, so its actually much worse but we cannot predict that unless we assume todays BTC/USD exchange rate. Also if we do that we would have to increase the value of the investment in scenario 2 by the same amount every month and add that to those 0.2608BTC, so you would always stay behind.
Now at that point in time (where youve reached 0.2608BTC), your miner is making next to nothing unless you look only at the most optimistic scenario where difficulty/ hashrate decrease, so your asset is worth next to nothing at that point as well.
Good luck selling the miner at that point in time, once it becomes worthless to you, it is worthless to others as well.
This is exactly why I'm making the case for selling S9 miners now instead of mining.
People are not aware of the numbers presented above, they only look at what they would earn today (on those online calculators), and so they are willing to pay massive prices for miners available today, more than double what you pay for them from Bitmain. Money you can convert into BTC today!
This is the opportunity today but it will not last and your miner will never make you that kind of BTC anyway, that's what the hashrate predictions show.