Have you seen the prices today? May be a good time to just spend the $700 just buying the coin outright if you believe in them.
On the long term it is better to mine. Why spend $700 when you are not sure how much they will be at any given time, you could get a bad deal or a good one just as easily. Build a cheap mining rig and reap essentially free (aside power and hardware cost) coin forever, which is immune to what the current exchange rate is because no matter what 1 BTC/LTC is still just that regardless of how much they are worth in fiatworld at the time. Id rather have a miner someday pulling in BTC out of the air when they are worth much more than they are now then simply buying a few coins. Mining is ongoing, a one time purchase of BTC won't generate you any more coins after that unless you like playing the markets.
(which really shouldn't matter to you if you are a driver of this tech and not just some hot shot Wall Bankster parasite in it to make a quick buck and then deride the whole system because it didn't make you an overnight millionaire. If you are one of those, we don't serve your kind here, the droids will have to wait outside)
Plus mining is good for expanding and securing the network at large, so there is that too.
It is only better to mine if difficulty stays reasonable. ASIC are destroying GPU mining profits. The only thing that kept it alive was the price run. If you're mining LTC, you'll be mining at a loss soon too as the people with free electricity can convert from BTC to LTC mining. Anybody paying for electricity will be on thin margins. If you expect the coins to go up in value, why even bother mining them when 1 click gets you the coins.
If you leave a miner on and it spend $3 a day in electricity but only produces $2 of coin what's the point? You can buy $2 of coin every day on an exchange, save $1 and not have to deal with a nagging wife or your cat getting shocked
I'm not discouraging mining (you can tell from all my posts here I've been trying to help noobs) but there is a point where it is stupid to plop down $700 to chase after $100. If it's a learning process then have at it. If the goal is to make money, just buy the coin and enjoy your 10 hours saved by going to the beach or working a job to buy more coin.
