I know what you mean, I think. I could be more polite, right? Well, the problem is it's very frustrating and damaging to see so much bad advice. I literally had someone compare this to owning a bakery and depreciating on an oven. Some guy who has never mined Bitcoin ever takes one accounting class and learns about depreciation and they think it applies to everything, very annoying to watch it spread and be recited as gospel. The very important rule with capitalizing equipment is that it MUST have a useful life beyond 1 year. Without getting into WHY depreciation is good for real businesses with that type of equipment we can just eliminate the static and just say "no". This ASIC gear, historically speaking, cannot be projected for a useful life beyond 1 year, and therefore it cannot be put on a depreciation schedule. Now, if someone wants to do that they can, but they will end up showing excessive profits that do not really exist. At this point someone would need to try to make a case FOR depreciating because the reasons why not to are so pronounced.
I am the oven guy, and I was speaking to you as if you were ignorant of the concept of depreciation, and I apologize for misunderstanding. My position is that a standalone mining rig would be considered by the IRS to be in asset class 00.12. While, logically, it shouldn't, as you have pointed out it may (although a high enough rise in $/btc or an anomalous drop in the hashrate may invalidate that assumption) have a useful life less than a year. I, not wanting to take an aggressive stance against IRS rulings, would put my mining rig in the asset class 00.12. And, yes, I am a miner with a recently purchased rig.