Quote from: mineshop.eu on August 24, 2018, 10:11:39 AM

Quote from: DrG on August 23, 2018, 10:29:37 PM

Quote from: DevelopmentBank on August 23, 2018, 11:47:53 AM

Quote from: DrG on August 22, 2018, 08:27:26 AM

If you spent $5 on electricity but only get $3 of XMR you're losing $2 of XMR you could have bought on an exchange. That's is completely irrespective of owning a miner or not.

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If your goal is to make fiat money from crypto conversion, then it never makes sense to mine at a loss. NEVER.

I see your point and it is logically valid. Howerver, mining is almost never irrespective of owning a miner or not. It does make sense to simply buy from an exchange, but you may not be considering the factor that people who already have a miner, are already too invested to accept that they have lost. People who are mining at a loss are probably still in denial or are too lazy or passive to realize that they need to sell their equipment.

I made a long post in another thread somewhere a year ago about how mining only pays off in the long run (ie 2-5 year span) if the coin is expected to be a failure. If you expect the coin to succeed - you should always buy the coin outright at the start. Buying the coin gives you the opportunity to sell in the event that you need the money (like lots of noobs panicking here because they put liens on their cars or houses to pay for mining equipment). You also tend to get more coins that had you mined.

People who already have a miner - well owning a miner doesn't mean you should compound your mistake by mining at a loss. Again these idiots lack critical thinking skills. They think by not using the miner they're letting the miner go to waste. But again, refer the the example I gave - why only get $3 of coin with $5 of electricity. Only reason would be to support the coin or for people who can't buy off an exchange or people who want to hide their coins.

People sitting on underwater hardware need to decide whether to sell or hold onto the hardware. If they sell they can buy the coins with the proceeds. If they sit on the hardware maybe they can use it again later when mining is profitable. That's the only choice.

It never makes sense to mine at a loss to fiat.

But people chasing money out of greed (instead of a desire to improve themselves through learning and the experience of mining) will do what all the other sheep do and keep on mining. I am a physician and I see everyday the stupid stuff humans do to their body after being told repeatedly not to do destructive behavior.

I sold my Antminer S3s a few years back after I actually made more in BTC than the miners costs at the time of purchase (yeah Bitmain doesn't do that anymore - that's why they are pretty much crooks in my book). I might have only got a hundred for each one, but I bought BTC with those proceeds and got more BTC than the person mining it could ever mine to this day. Sure the person who bought them saw BTC rise to $22k from the $150 or so BTC was back then and he did well - but I did much better by putting my money into the coins.

If you have a decent job I would just try to focus on selling all unnecessary "junk" or working overtime and just buying the coin you want. I think prices will continue to go down or sideways for another year - this is 2014 all over again. But you can't time the market unless you make the market like Roger Ver.

It is all about making the right decisions. I did a detail calculation few comments ago that it was actually more profitable to buy mining rig year ago then buy eth and hodl , you would mined 10 eth in one year with one mining rig 3k worth, where is you have bought it at this stage you would actually lost.

Ofcourse if you keep mining and crypto never recovers you would be in loos, same as if you buy coin now every day if your rig is switched off. So think there is no point of switching off if you want to accumulate more coins. Because if you have electricity at decent price under 10c per KWH , coin cannot go much under production cost, none wants to sell their coins at loos. Only bunch of scared noobs. If no miner sells coins there is no inflation.
Its simple ecanomics , now there is demand less then there is supply. If the supply decreases , price starts to grow.

I read that post that you're referring to. The problem is that you are either denying or not acknowledging the lost of opportunity. Mining is a hedge against a coin failing. Essentially you can say that can sell the equipment (well GPUs anyway) for nearly purchase price in the event of a coin failing. On the contrarian position - somebody who buys the coin doesn't have to sit there everyday to make sure stupid Win 10 update hasn't taken a miner offline or that the pool you're mining at is skimming of the top or even worse running away with your crypto. The person who bought it can spend the time saved earning more money to pay for the gamble or has the chance to exit quickly if they need to.

Once you have coins in hand you know exactly what your break even point is - the price at which you bought in at plus exchange fees. People who bought ETH last year at $300 should have sensibly sold some (if not all) at $1200 to $1500. Once simple click would have resulted in 5x fiat profit, and should they like - they could always rebuy the ETH now and get 5x as much.

Of course this is all hindsight - but it does show the dichotomy - the strengths and weaknesses of both. If you had lots of capitol and were willing to take 100% loss people should have bought coins and not mining eq. If they wanted to just put 1 foot in the crypto ocean - they build rigs.

Here's hindsight - ETH had fallen all the way to $10, even $7 during last January when DASH starting during it's insane rise. Nobody wanted ETH (well except the believers - Polo trollbox chat showed this). If you bought then you would be up 30x from just holding 6 months longer than somebody buying in July. That's why it makes sense to look at the big picture.

ETH is the perfect of example of a coin that you shouldn't have mined (even though I did). If you bought the coin at launch is was sub 1 penny. You could never mine as much ETH with a single RX 480 going full tilt to today as if you had spent all the money on the coin at ICO.

So - if you expect the coin to fail mine it. If you expect it to succeed buy it (at least well timed buys - doesn't take a genius to not buy ETH at 1500 or BTC at 20K+).

Miners really should spend time reading the speculation and investing parts of this forum. Sticking your head into the mining forums 12 hours a day seeing if they can eek out 1 more sol out of 1060 by changing drivers or tweaking with settings are missing the forest through the trees.

Bitcoin sat dead after hitting $1200 for 4 years with most of the world saying it was dead. It dropped from $1200 to $100. With all that idiotic ICO money thrown at scams last year, the ETH demand is just going to keep going down - it's a race to the bottom.... until some major trigger.