You cannot be serious and recommend the average joe to invest real $$, their hard earned savings, into buying crypto coins as an investment. The crypto market shed nearly half its value, or over 5B in recent times. A lot of people lost a LOT of money with the recent market trauma.
You call me optimistic when I say an R290 pays for itself in a few weeks. That's not optimism, thats history, its repeated here over and over. For someone who isn't keen sensed on markets, mining is infinitely safer with lower rewards.
I specifically excluded situations where someone would have bought mining equipment ANYWAY even if coins were worthless. We're not talking about a gamer who mines on the side. I specifically excluded that situation already because we both agree on it. Once again, I am not saying mining is not profitable. I'm also excluding situations where people were gonna buy a R9 290 anyway regardless of whether bitcoins go to zero tomorrow or not. And yes some people are hobbyists who would literally mine for a LOSS, but I'm not talking about those situations. I'm talking strictly about profitability.
If you honestly don't care if coins go to zero tomorrow or not, then I'm not talking about people like you.
If you DO care about profits, then I'd encourage people to crunch the numbers before risking hard-earned money because some guy told you mining was low risk--even though it is almost as risky as buying direct, in the long run!
In the example above, if you spent $700 buying litecoin at the beginning of 2013, you would have just as many litecoins as someone who spent $7500 mining. Paying $700 is a LOT less risk than paying $7500. Even if the currency goes to zero, the guy who buys $700 loses only up to $700. The guy who bought $7500 in mining equipment and power bills would have lost
thousands of dollars in power bills and hardware depreciation costs (CPU, mobo, PSU, RAM, GPUs, and yes if bitcoin went to zero tomorrow it would drag alt-coins with it to zero, and GPU prices would go back to normal, like $150 or less for a used 7950). See above links, in this particular example, the breakeven point on risk was about a month so that after a month, the miner and buyer saw pretty much the same risks if coin value went to zero. Seriously, do the math yourself if you don't believe me.
I've been on bitcointalk.org for ages, and what I say isn't controversial there because a lot of those folks bought coins directly, held onto it, and profited 10-20x more than miners. In fact some people both mined and bought and would tell you the same thing I just did.