When I was mining circa 2017 - 2021 (approx. 1 BTC/month and 25-30 ETH/month) and planning it all out, I prepared myself psychologically to operate for up to 2 years without any profits or selling. It was a hard pill to swallow and a huge risk; my costs were $8500/month in electrical and then another ~$2200 on a lease for the warehouse. When it dropped to $3,000/BTC a few months after I came online and stayed there for 6-8 months, I started wondering if I was the biggest dumbass in my county.

Thankfully, it all worked out in the end very well. I don't know how anyone would put in the effort/money to get a major crypto farm going and plan to just cash out every month to pay bills. What's the point? I always thought of it as a long-term bet on the price going way up, which it did.

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VladVladikoff 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Seems like you could have made that same bet by just buying BTC with that money and doing twice as good.

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acidphreak2k 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Up to a point; once it was over $12k or so, it was cheaper to mine them than to buy them. But yeah, I guess in retrospect I could have just dumped ~$450k into buying BTC when it was at $3,000 and made 3x what I ended up making, but there were other considerations for why I did it at the time. The mining was co-located with my cannabis grow/operations, and in many ways the mining was started secondary to that, even though the mining ended up being a little more profitable over the life of the facility

	▲	red_admiral 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> The [bitcoin] mining was co-located with my cannabis grow/operations HN quote of the day!

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embedding-shape 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I dunno, probably only if you don't count for human psychology. If they bought N BTC and tried to held them, would they still hold them when they double in value? What about increasing 10-fold?

Compared to doing some work to getting 1 BTC per month, which you can then individually decide what to do with, instead of a lump sum you could cash out at any moment.

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OJFord 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I mined in 2014 with free electricity and that was true even then. That's with hindsight though, the mining reward is more predictable than that market price would increase (more than) equivalently.