Yeah the fact that pubco's can mine at a loss and just take out debt through convertible notes and other financing options means they can leverage tools from US credit markets and the financial industry that give them a yuuuge competitive advantage in the short to medium term, especially since they're just playing to increase their stock price. But I don't think it's very sustainable in the long run... my sense is that's why they are all pivoting so hard to AI/HPC now; they see the writing on the wall.



And yes, I agree that mining sustainably at profit is difficult and requires a lot of checked boxes, as you say. The list I provided before is by no means easy to meet, but i think it gives some good guidelines as to what's required to participate and stay in the game. My experience has also been that mining is a game of survival so you just need to be able to hold on and keep chipping away at your operating costs and integrate upstream as much as you can, then i think you can still play and win in the long run. I guess my point was that I wouldn't underestimate the average joe, anyone can play as long as they find the right conditions: I think that's kind of the point.

For those that are interested in mining without all this hassle, I've been building a hashrate marketplace, rigly.io. We have a new product that we're still in early stages of fielding called fixed-return mining where the idea is you can finance a miner by paying for their hashrate upfront and they will mine to your pool account until you make a fixed-return over what you paid for. You can think of it as interest paid in hashrate.