What a fantastic community; all these guys jumping in to help
My advice/opinion would be to buy btc mainly; its been sideways for a while it's about time to have a good sustained rally
but diversification is best; so maybe use 10k to buy some mining equipment from one of the best producers, avalon or asicminer, and the rest just purchase btc
oh and this should be in the 'mining support' section:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=40.0Can you justify recommending to order either avalon or asicminer hardware at this time? What would be the time to ROI for either hardware even if received today?
Test your idea here:
http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/both those companies showed they can make hardware faster than other companies
no one knows the btc price so it's always a gamble with ROI
no one talks about a damn timeframe when they mention ROI. it's like everyone expects to get their month back in 6 months; that's ridiculous. If you only plan to fuck with btc for 6 months, you don't get much respect from the veterans here.
Those companies can make and ship a million units a day, but as the difficulty get's higher, there could be zero return on investment
in all time frames. The only way to counter the observed increase rate in difficulty is progressively cheaper & more efficient equipment and/or much higher bitcoin price. Avalon and Asicminer are among the least efficient asic equipment out there (BFL and BitFury both ship and have better efficiency). With a more conservative monthly difficulty increase of 60% (it's averaging 70% now) and bitcoin valued at $250 (double the current price) you would STILL be making a losing investment in both Avalon and Asicminer for at least the next year with no hope for ROI. If you plan to break even in one year due to bitcoin increasing, then you should just buy bitcoin instead of turning your wheels to catch up with your ass.
If you can't get some serious leveraged deals, then the best thing is to hold bitcoin for now, imo.
As for respect of bitcoin enthusiasts, that has zero bearing on the wisdom of an investment.