Doge is an example. There are many others, any time of day there are fluctuations in profitability of other alt coins: MEC, Worldcoin, Digitalcoin, Fastcoins etc etc, they can rise in price or fall.
You still haven't addressed my example, you invest $ in Tickets/Digitalcoin (whatever), buy a lot. It tanks in value (ratio of BTC), the investor loses $. The miner switches to another coin that hasn't tank. Capiche?
Hardware is still there, in reality. Your investment, poof, to the clouds. You trying to make mining seem AS Risky as investing $$ to buy coins is ridiculous to the extreme. The level of risk is nowhere as close.
Edit: There's a perfect example of this a few pages back, user buys coins with euros, made a calculation error, poof.. money gone. If he had bought a GPU to mine, it would still be there and if his preferred coin loses value he can mine another. The risk is in the order of magnitude less to buy hardware to mine, but so is the potential reward, much less than investing $ to buy coins. Like everything, risk vs rewards.
Actually, I have addressed your tired point over and over again. See above.
And now your arguments are getting more and more ludicrous, you are using some guy's fat finger or brain fart or whatever as an argument for mining? Seriously? So if he accidentally pushed the wrong button and made a ton of money, would that be an argument
for buying direct? If you insist on bringing up "fat finger" arguments, then you need to account for lucky fat fingers.
Further, if you insist on including stuff like that, why not also include low-probability-but-high-consequence mining accidents? For instance, if your power supply had a latent defect and it burns up while mining in the middle of the night, setting fire to your home and half of your block, and kills you and your family as well as handing your next of kin a bunch of lawsuits from angry neighbors, how much is that worth? More or less than what you'd lose from a "fat finger" accident?
Anyway, we've been over this time and again. You are ignoring
depreciation and power costs. Most people do not have free power (and even "free" power isn't really free--someone's paying for it, and we all pay for it in terms of greenhouse gas emissions).
The power costs are non-recoverable and after months of mining it really starts to add up to hundreds, then thousands of dollars--much more than the cost of the GPUs themselves. As for GPUs, they do break and
depreciate. I've had one fan go bust and another GPU die, for instance. Even if video cards survive the torture of mining, current prices are pretty risky because their value as gaming cards is lower than current market rates. For instance, a few months ago HD7950s were going for $150 brand new when on sale. Bitcoin was $100 back then. If bitcoin drops to $100 again, those HD7950s may well sell for less than $150 (used mining cards less valuable than virgin, unused, new-in-box 7950s). The last time you seriously attempted to argue this, you wound up assuming that the miner lived on a Canadian glacier with cheap hydro power or whatever and thus could mine year round without heat and power issues that most miners have to face. I wish I were joking, but you actually argued that. And yes, I agree that in extreme cases like that, mining isn't as risky. But few of us live on Canadian glaciers next to a hydro dam. You can always find exceptions, like a Hawaiian guy attempting to mine at 47 cents/kWh (their power is produced from burning oil, which is among the most expensive ways to produce electricity).