Bcp,
I mostly agree with your points here and elsewhere, but this one is a losing fight;
A block eruptor blade at this point is far superior to a jalapeño; you could get the blade and watch difficulty adjust once, maybe twice, while you wait; waiting for the jalapeño means probably 6 or 8 difficulty adjustments will go by. Basically though, NEITHER will be profitable, but the eruptor will lose it slower by virtue of getting it at a lower difficulty.
Yes, AM has typically sold asics at extreme markups because they could boast that theirs would ship immediately, and that's been bad for people returns; the world will look a lot different come November; basically the way things look, no miner will be profitable. There's no sense in arguing semantics, defending bfl or am, they both offer exceedingly poor deals at this point.
You are the first person to speak sense. +1
I know value vs value is like a bird in the hand being worth more than 2 in the bush. Being a better value don't make it worth buying though.
I already gambled with my prior mining income and gotten more back than I spent for my Jala. I may or may not have done as well if I had had 2x the BTC to play with, just cause I turned 2BTC into 5.3BTC don't mean 4BTC would have ended up 10.6BTC.
The ONLY thing people can do today is gamble that BTC value will increase and they will end up with more Fiat than they started with. Bring on the clowns and their "you shoulda bought BTC and held!"
Exactly; I've always considered bitcoin denominated returns nonsense. The reason being, bitcoin isn't a native currency, one that you can pay rent, mortgage, food and taxes with. In my mind, our portfolios are denominated in dollars (or euros or whichever other fiat is favored by the nation you live in).
There was someone complaining that on a bitcoin basis, his bfl made an abysmal return, and I had to argue that while its true, it's not the whole picture - our portfolios are fiat based, and making the decision to buy mining equipment vs holding bitcoin is an allocation decision that each person has to make; just because someone chose to buy something in bitcoins and didn't make back those bitcoins while the exchange rate skyrocketed doesn't mean they "lost"money, just that they didn't earn what they could have otherwise.
It's said repeatedly that past results don't imply future returns, and that is nowhere more true that bitcoin, where the entire economy is 100% speculative, and incredibly tiny and illiquid to boot. Nothing we see anywhere has anything to do with fundamentals, is all to do with the prevailing sentiment of the last few people to place decent sized orders.
Yes, bitcoin went from 6 to $140 in a year and change; but prior to that, it had lost almost 80% from its peak in the year prior... Even now, its down just under 50% from its all time high, and it had fallen 75 or 80% when that high was reached. So to think that it's continued march upwards is a foregone conclusion... Well, its not. It could just as easily stumble and take another 80% dive. Again, the market is so small, so illiquid, that it wouldn't take too much action to cause a drop on that level. Or, yes, a spike too, to be fair. Point being, there's no assurance of anything. That bitcoin did great in the last year means exactly nothing going forward. This is all uncharted territory; I unfortunately think its going to hit a brick wall soon, but all that means is my opinion of it offsets someone else's bullish opinion.