Hey there,
Flaws:
1. The equipment doesn't exist, no one has ever seen evidence that it is real, and there is a very large possibility you will get nothing for your money. What is the ROI for that?
2. If you do get it, it will be many months from now. Difficulty will definitely be vastly higher so your earnings will be a fraction of what you estimate.
3. Price can go down in the face of rising difficulty, it has happened many times before. Look at long term difficulty charts. Difficulty ALWAYS go up. Price can and does go down for years at a time.
1. OK, then we'll just get Antminer S9s, current price is $2,725 and they'll be delivered in February. Once in the EU, they'll retail for around $4,000, that's a 150% ROI just on the hardware + all what you can get mining.
2 & 3. That's my real concern, the true profits of bitcoin mining at this stage. Right now you recover the cost of the machines by mining for ~1.5 months, but it's going downhill very fast. If I receive the machines in February, will it take me 4 or 6 months to recover the cost by then, or 3 years? (I don't know how difficult will mining be in April/May/etc.). Anything less than a year it's good, since the machines can go for 1.5+ years working 24/7 afaik. That means substantial profit. Therefore, how is this not a good investment?
Mining is a bet AGAINST difficulty increase... Based on current coin price and supply of equipment that is not
a bet many folks will win
Back to the days when pre-orders are the fucking norm. I'll never understand how so many people are happy to give interest free loans to their competition for magic money machines. Whats even funnier as you point out is that in so many cases buying and holding is a vastly better investment especially when you actually think about the risk/reward ratio!
Mining is a bet AGAINST difficulty increase... Based on current coin price and supply of equipment that is not
a bet many folks will win.
Welcome back all investomers you are the wet dream of your competition!
By joining a mining pool, mining profits are proportional to the number of machines you've got. Expenses (machine cost, energy consumption) are also proportional. If mining is still profitable for someone with 1,000 machines, it's also profitable for someone who owns just one.
And, if mining isn't going to be profitable, does this mean all these manufacturers are cashing out on these orders and then stop their business? And that all the buyers and everyone with thousands of bitcoin mining-specific equipment will have their millionaire investments rendered useless?
Cheers
Are you a re-seller or miner?
I dunno about re-selling them but 4k when you get them sounds high to me. But maybe coins will be 40k and people will still pay 4k for a miner. If coins flat line at 17k or drop and hash rate skyrockets seems unlikely an S9 would fetch 4k.
For every miner you buy the manufacture can use the money to put 2 or 3 or 4 or whatever number more machines online for themselves... They can also do it now because you gave them the money now and drive up the difficulty with your money while you sit and wait for it to arrive. I cant imagine that the 10% jumps were seeing are just retails sales of S9's. The batches sell in minutes, so someone is adding a fuck ton of hashpower to the network (lol go figure with 17k coins!!!).
I always looked at mining roi in terms of BTC not fiat. How many coins could I just buy right this minute with my budget ($1.00 or $1 million) which we can call X. If after your gear becomes obsolete you have X+ then mining was a good choice. If you have X- then buying and holding would have yielded more profit!
The manufactures are very good at pricing machines at just the point where only a select few can make X+ a reality. Remember they have a much better idea of what is coming online then you do. Hence the recent price hike of the S9's.
With mining you don't have any liquidity, which of course is a risk.
Lots of people (mostly in China) and some in Europe, North America and the rest of the world as well make X+ and will for a long time. You might be one of them to which I say good luck sir. As a total side note if you do mine please don't mine on antpool, find a good pool!
Mining was designed as a near zero sum game on purpose and its always working its way towards that (fucking beautiful fucking design if you ask me!).
Anyways hope this helped and good luck!