Also, and this is my opinion only, the DNotes I mine go straight to my wallet or DNotesVault. I don't sell any to pay the bills as it is my opinion that DNotes will be far too valuable in the future to spend or sell now, it would be loosing money to me.
I think that many miners are missing the long term picture. If you are mining and selling a coin at USD $0.01 and that coin appreciates to $1.00 in four or 5 years, you have done yourself a series disservice with the coins sold early. As long as you can pay the bills without selling mined coins, I would say hold them all. And this goes back to the first part, choosing the right investment coins in the first place. Good choices make profitable investments, period.
RJF, firstly, I agree.
I know you are pretty well versed when it comes to mining. If someone were to ask you about buying equipment today, would you recommend mining over buying the coins directly?
There are two parts to my answer. Why is the person considering mining over buying?
1. If you are NOT a hobbyist with a serious interest in computers in general, I would say buy your coins. It is no longer possible to amass a serious amount of DNotes buy mining unless you have more than 100 MH/s to dedicate. 40 MHs/ per day, every day, will get you about 50,000 NOTE per year. That's a lot of electricity and time spent keeping the miners going. Not to mention tying up a decent computer for that time period. Initial outlay varies but, a used ZUES X6 40 MH/s SCRIPT ASIC will cost around 350 to 400 USD (ebay). Not too hard to take but, that same 400 dollars will buy you about 40,000 NOTE at todays price. (around 0.00004550) So, after figuring in power cost (not going to place a figure here, varies too much but, several USD a day), upkeep, and lost PC usage, it really makes more sense to buy your DNotes.
2. On the other hand, if you ARE a hobbyist, you will ignore all those downsides mentioned above, cobble something together, and mine for the fun of it with profit secondary. In that case, mine away, it's fun and technically interesting. And, you get the bonus of accumulating something that will have real value in a few years.
So, there is no hard and fast answer to your question other than this:
Mine for fun and possibly a large future return if you know what your doing. Or, buy as an investment if you don't want to be bothered by all the technical stuff. And the third option, which is my strategy, DO BOTH!
PS: I am not a proponent of using a PC for other tasks while mining. It is best to dedicate a machine for the purpose even with external ASICs.
BTW: My answer strictly applies to DNotes. I would not even consider mining Bitcoin, my SHA stuff costs hundreds to run per month and the return is no longer there.