Sure, but that's not what he/she suggested. The original post said unplug and wait until it has "its moment". Which mathematically makes no sense if you are sure that moment is coming (unless, again, you are selling daily).
If the miner is losing money then it makes sense to unplug it and use the money to buy coins instead. By mining at a loss and holding you're essentially buying coins above market price.
Ok, two things here:
!) what money? The electricity? Because if you sell the miner you have a limited amount of funds to buy coins, and no ability to mine them later. If you keep the miner to mine the coin later, then turning it off now makes no sense unless you aren't sure it will be profitable later.
2) I don't think you understand. If you mine 1 coin at a loss right now, and later that coin triples, if you held it you actually mined it at a profit, not a loss (plus your actual earnings, in the altcoin, will be higher now, since the difficulty will increase/rewards will decrease). It's only mined at a loss if you sell it before it gains value. So if you TRULY BELIEVE that a coin will eventually grow in value, turning off a miner makes little sense.
If it costs me $0.50 to mine one Bytom that currently trades at $0.40 it would be quite stupid to continue mining. I could just take the $0.50 and buy 1.25 Bytom instead.
Whether to sell the miner or not - that's a different scenario. If you really think that it will be very profitable to mine with it at some point in the future then perhaps it makes sense to switch it off and keep it for a while. However seeing that GPUs are much more efficient it's very unlikely that you would ever be able to mine more Bytom than you could buy right now with the proceeds of selling the miner. If Bytom moons, difficulty will moon too.
In any case, mining at a loss doesn't make sense. Don't do that kids.
Yes. If you spend that money on buying the coins, it makes more sense. That is, again, not what the premise was nor what I was replying to. And yes, of course on the selling the miner, but the whole premise of the conversation is that the coin will bounce back. As for the mooning comment, not necessarily, but that's a whole other conversation.
My point was if you truly believe it will be profitable again based on the coin's value, then unplugging your miner doesn't make sense. If you prefer to buy it, then ok, but what I am saying is you are mining at the rate and value of the coin at the point you sell it, not at the point you mine it. In which case mining at a loss does indeed make sense (edit: or rather, can).
Also if your difference is $.10/day, if you're buying the amount you would have mined it's only profitable if you buy a chunk of time's worth at a time, the fees will make the difference there. And if you use the heat for anything (like I do), then you're not really paying to mine as much as mining for heat, which you would otherwise have to pay for anyway.
So my point is if you really believe it will be profitable in the future it mathematically does not make sense to turn off your machine unless you are planning to use the electricity money to buy that coin at that time (in some way where the fee costs work out to be profitable). Continuing to mine a coin that you are sure will increase in value is otherwise always going to be far more profitable than shutting your miner off.