Quote from: PetraGold on Today at 11:46:06 AM

What I think.
Mining creates the equivalent of a competitive lottery that makes it very difficult for anyone to consecutively add new blocks of transactions into the block chain. This protects the neutrality of the network by preventing any individual from gaining the power to block certain transactions. This also prevents any individual from replacing parts of the block chain to roll back their own spends, which could be used to defraud other users. Mining makes it exponentially more difficult to reverse a past transaction by requiring the rewriting of all blocks following this transaction.

It is actually not a lottery in the sense that lotteries are uncertain and designed for the player to lose.

Mining is certain ( in a mathematical way )

Buy a miner cheaply like 100 for an s9 with a psu back in summer of 2020 or December 2018.
Have cheap or free power.

You most certainly will pay it off.
You most certainly will profit.

Buy a miner at top dollar like April this year.
Have not so cheap power.

you most certainly will not pay it off
you most certainly will lose.

The task of block hitting with a miner no longer has the importance that it once did.

This is tricky but look at viabtc.com pps+ payout
Set the payout to 0.001 btc
set the miners up 200 th earns 200 x 0.0000063 = 0.00126 a day

you get a daily payout to say coinbase.

you only risk losing 0.00126 or about $43 usd on any given day.

lets say you purchased 2 s19 pro at 2200 each.

yeah they sold that low if you grabbed them last year.

This is a simple steady income stream. Not much like a lottery.

But if you could only mine solo you would be correct.

Pools setup like via btc altered the lottery concept.
As a miner it is all about cheap power and buying the gear at a good price.

other factors are
gear stays working
no fires
power stays cheap