No actually, because you keep touting that several times, that if people listened to you and bought coins, they would have made 10x the profit. No shiat sherlock, NOW its obvious.
What I asked you is whether they should listen to you now and buy LTC at $26 a coin and hold it, whether they would get 10x their profit again...
Which is true, it depends a lot on what ifs, and I do agree nobody can predict the future. This is the point I've been trying to make. People who choose to mine, do so knowing full well they can earn potentially less profit than if they buy coins outright. But they mine because 1) they want to minimize risk, mine-sell to pay off for investment and make small profits, or 2) they love PC hardware.
But everytime I see someone come here asking about setting up a mining rig, in you come, with your 4% difficulty rising and your calculator showing them zero chance of ROI. Is that a positive encouragement for their mining or a negative one? Thus, you cannot blame me for thinking you are trying to discourage mining.
In other words you're a hypocrite because no shiat sherlock of course mining back then would be profitable knowing what we know today. So why then did you attempt to tweak me several posts ago by specifically calling me out when I had nothing to do with it? You brought this upon yourself by trying to pick a fight with me.
Your argument in the past has hinged on how mining is allegedly less risky than buying and holding, and as I have repeatedly shown, that has not been true historically.
Btw, every year since bitcoin started, people have been very nervous about its future price. 4 years ago, people had so little confidence in it that it wasn't even worth a cent. Even a year ago, bitcoin was ~$20 with an all-time-high of $32 and almost nobody forecasted $1200. In 2014 bitcoin is currently worth $800 and $10k seems unthinkable. Yet bitcoin's total market cap is still a paltry $10 billion. Why do you think bitcoin won't go much higher than it is now? Why are you such a pessimist on bitcoin prices? The only way mining makes sense is if coin prices remains in a certain range: high enough to be profitable given difficulty, yet low enough that it is a little more profitable to mine than buy-and-hold. What makes you think coin prices are going to stay in that range?
I also think it's inconsistent for you in some posts to say that mine-and-hold is best because you forecast coin prices going up, and yet whenever you try to attack me, you claim mining is less risky. But mining is only less risky if you sell as you mine or if you think prices are rangebound. Under your own advice, mine-and-hold, mining *is* risky and is potentially even riskier than buy-and-hold, for any given level of profit expectation, because if coins go to zero you wind up with depreciate hardware and tons of power bills.
In my menu of options post, I have made it crystal clear that I'm not talking about sunk-cost video cards, i.e., cards you were gonna buy even if coins were worth zero, so my menu already takes that into consideration.
Difficulty rising is one of the things you can be reasonably certain about because AMD GPUs give more hash per dollar and per watt with each cycle. It's the same reason why you can get the performance of a GTX 570 for $100-150 today, whereas it used to cost what, $350-400? So you can't really say that difficulty going up is uncertain. Some things are less certain than others. That's not even getting into Scrypt ASICs btw, as those are already in development with engineering samples out in no later than early December 2013 judging by the GridSeed photos. The last two months have seen difficulty changes of more than 60% and 80% (Nov and Dec 2013) and January difficulty is already up over 20%.
IMHO Listening to you is like listening to an extremist news channel. For instance, every time someone asks about mining you NEVER talk about difficulty despite its being reasonably certain to keep going up (for reasons I stated above) and make it sound like it's risk-free so they can go ahead and buy overpriced cards, we're gonna be riiiich. Since *you* won't bring up difficulty changes, *I* will. I can't let that stuff slide without saying something.
As some people on this thread have stated in posts and PMs, they appreciate my posts in this thread and have learned from them. If you do not enjoy my posts, please skip over them or put me on Ignore.
P.S. You edited your post to talk about altcoins. We've already had this discussion which ended with you slinking off after I exposed the logical fallacy in your posts. The implicit assumption in your arguments is that you know the profitability of any given day of mining BEFORE the end of the day. This implies you can predict the future. In some cases the arbitrage opportunity is so huge, like dogecoin was for a while, that it is indeed a no-brainer to mine dogecoin for that day. However, the last couple of months is anomalous due to the flood of new speculators that the bitcoin bubble unleashed. I've already addressed this too.
http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=35930802&postcount=8535 Also
http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=35934311&postcount=8599
Also worth nothing that mining and speculating are not mutually exclusive or in any way related.
No. They are indeed related. Just ask anyone who buys gold and/or gold mining stocks. You can speculate on the gold directly or on gold mining companies via the stock market, and gold mining company inputs vary on price. You can also buy derivatives such as futures, options, etc. Furthermore, prices drive difficulty which affects mining. If it weren't for the spike in bitcoin prices do you think we'd have seen difficulty rise so far so fast late last year? Of course not. They are indeed related. (Analogy in the real world: for a while you could make over $200k per year doing gold mining in Australia, because miners knew companies were keen to cash in and could pay it. This is because gold prices were high. High gold prices drove miner wages up; high crypto prices drive difficulty up. Price IS related to mining profitability and thus price IS related to mining.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970204621904577016172350869312)
What I would agree with though is that you can do a mix--buy coins and mine at the same time, or mine and hedge by shorting coins, etc. But it is simply incorrect to say that prices and mining are "in now way related."