Quote from: drmadison on May 11, 2020, 10:35:52 PM

Hey all,

Not sure anyone here remembers me (it's been years probably since I've been around) but used to have a decent little mine, and even ran a few small group mining efforts ages ago (like over 5 years ago, so eternity in bitcoin time). Sold my miners and cashed out most of my bitcoin and moved on with life.

Then all of a sudden it hit me again... And I went back and bought up some bitcoin. And I went and looked at some miners, and some calculators. And what everything tells me is that it's impossible to buy a miner and mine without losing a ton of money. Granted our electricity rates in the SF Bay Area are stupid high, but even halving them it seems like it's impossible to buy a machine, mine with it and ever break even.

So that led me to the age-old question, why do you choose to mine bitcoin with aging, rapidly depreciating miners vs. just buying bitcoin? For the cost of 1 Antminer I can buy more bitcoin than it will ever mine me...

Honestly not trying to say this in a hostile manner - I'd just love to hear people's reasoning because I'd LOVE an excuse to justify getting back into it

Sometimes it is better to just buy. Mining a coin that is not in its infancy will increasingly need renewable energy solutions for it to be worth it. That is one of the many game theory approaches for technological advancement that is at hand. The idea is to get to a point where the energy is self-generating via solar or some other means that mining farms have a net 0 cost to run thus making mining a true universal earned income. Simultaneously as happened with transistors, this market for renewable energy solutions would drive the cost of it down and allow its expansion.

That being said, my intuition is that in less than 10 years mining will happen using quantum computers as will as that sounds.