Investing 10k in some mining gear (I consider 10k to be the maximum limit for calling it a home mining operation) to get what...500$ a month?
To my knowledge, there was never a time where a mining gear took 20 months to ROI unless you plan on making it so by paying a fortune for a terrible mining gear at the worst time one can buy.
What about a little more reasonable numbers?
we know what the 5nm is capable of, and we know Bitmain can do.
S19- 52th at 2080w , say a home miner can manage 6kw of power, so they can buy 3 of these, using today's numbers at 6 cents kwh that gear makes about 140$ a month , so 3 of it make 420$ a month
at 1000$ per gear > 7 months to ROI
at 1200$ per gear > 8.5 months to ROI
at 1500$ per gear >10.7 months to ROI
It's highly unlikely that they will sell it for anything more than that judging by current gear prices, also for home miners it's more than just direct profit especially in the winter where they can use those miners for hear sources.
How much can bitmain hope to sell to those guys?
If mining becomes completely unprofitable for mining farms, all mining profits will move to home miners, things might be a lot more profitable than they are now, but certainly not as much as they sell now, which might also make production cost more expensive,thus makes the numbers above way off.
And more important, let's say the rivals do the opposite, now you're in one not so comfy spot!
True, It's very unlikely that Bitmain will do something different from the rest, these drastic changes will have to be universal, they won't be an option, the market will force itself upon them.
Rather than calling industrial mining dead if the price doesn't go at least to 10k this year I would look at mining gear manufacturing as a dead industry.
Yup that's another possibility, I think even if everyone who is into bitcoin decided to buy a gear or two, they won't get close to the amount of mining gears that huge farms combined buy, once we reach to that point, many things will change, some ASIC's manufacturer might shut down.
There is only one thing that needs to happen to make this discussion/debate completely irrelevant for years to come which is price moving higher gradually.