just adding to 600watt here. as long as you can afford to lose it youre fine. that should be a given.
i started mining at $10. it went to $35. yes! then.. down to $2 for a loooong time. a ~95% drop. but. look where we are today.
tl;dr: hodl
i had read about bitcoin when price was about $10 and right away decided to buy some. but I couldn't find a way to get some btc other than wiring money to the MtGox bank account in Tokyo. price rose every day and the money wouldn't arrive. and price kept on rising, doubling, tripling, etc.. on and on. the fuckin day the fuckin money was finally on my account ready to f i n a l l y buy, price was at.... you guessed it: $35
I finally bought and it felt great. when I checked my account a few hours later that same day, price had crashed. and it kept on crashing next day. and the day after.... man, that was shocking and I had no news. there was no media infrastructure, and main stream media didn't cover it and unfortunately I hadn't found this forum yet. no info, price kept crashing. then MtGox got hacked, I couldn't get to my account anymore. decided to throw everything away and forget about it. I was so ashamed I had sunken my money into this Japanese scam. price went down to $2.
I had bought right the top of bitcoins first insane bull run. I could have bought 17x more bitcoin if I had bought on the day it was on $2 instead of the day I had chosen to buy. one could say that I had royally fucked this one up and I really think I did. but
whining about a buying price of $35 is kinda weird.
cheers to you sharing that moment. you were already mining and I was a textbook noob. cheers to all 2011ers.
i had to lol at the bolded part. yup, i felt the same at the time as i watched it drop from $35 to $2, thought i had wasted money on buying a couple 5830s at like $150 apiece purely for mining because 5830s werent even that great compared to the 6870 i had for actual gaming. what a waste!! and yeah.. here we are.
i still have a couple of those early mining cards. the 6870 especially deserves to be gold plated and mounted in a display case, that was the 1st card i bought for mining with the object of also having a good gaming card no matter where bitcoin wound up.