People always said that buying is better than mining (and they have been right almost all of the time), but where's the fun in just buying?
When you're an ex-miner, recognize how unprofitable and a pain in the balls it is to run a mining operation, end up doing the math on a miner + electricity + Time to ROI... fuck the fun.
Time is money. Cheaper to buy what you would spend on a miner now, than what it would likely generate 18 months from now, IMO.
Unless you have cheap or free electricity, I don't see the benefit of mining right now vs just buying corn outright.
true now, but back in 2011 i sure wasnt going to hand over my ID and such to sketch af exchanges to buy corn. so i mined coins as it was safer from an identity theft point of view. no giving out info, just mine direct to my wallet.
so i did mine at a loss for a while (a year maybe?) but not much of a loss as opposed to straight up buying, perhaps a 20% premium? but then again i was used to doing folding@home and SETI, both which cost money (electric cost plus buying dedicated hardware that folded) and provided no return at all aside from the warm fuzzies in supporting science and medicine.
and that mining at a loss in the 2011-2012 timeframe sure paid off bigly. VERY bigly.
totay is of course different.