A lot of these doom and gloom 'mining is the devil' approaches fail to take into consideration what is happening right now. In the last two hours BTC has shed %20 of it's value...TWENTY PERCENT people!
For a retail investor who has say 5-10k to work with this is a nightmare. Imagine two people who began their BTC investment today. One guy bought 8k worth of hardware and started and the other one bought
7BTC. Now of course no investment is judged by what happens in such a small time frame but that having been said...
Which one of those two people do you think is having a worse day?
Yes, I know there are plenty of days where it runs the exact opposite. But even on those days the guy mining can watch his existing and new BTC go up too!
I am still really new here and learning but from what I have seen there is a negative bias towards mining that seems to have it's own agenda.
JMO.
Let's take your example for a moment and see where it goes.
So Andy goes out and buys a 2 TH/s miner from scamfast labs for April delivery. $8000
Brian buys $8000 worth of bitcoin. 10 BTC.
Tomorrow Andy is broke and Brian has 10 BTC. And it's going to stay that way for a long time.
Fast forward to April:
Brian has 10 BTC. He might be happy, he might be sad depending on the exchange rate, but he still has 10 BTC. And he could do whatever he wanted with it at any time. If bitcoin hit $100k one day and he thought that was too high, he could cash in for $1M and walk away.
Andy still has nothing. He checks bitcoincharts and sees that the network has crossed 100 Ph/s and is still climbing. It's going to take 140 days to get to 10 BTC if difficulty stops now, and more like a year if there has been no price appreciation and growth starts slowing. He better get hashing soon! Now where is Andy's scamfast machine? Better check the forums. Ah, Joe from Scamfast Labs is promising shipment in a couple weeks. Well that's 1 less bitcoin Andy will ever see, but it's not so bad, I guess, just 2 weeks. But wait, why is this guy complaining that his January order hasn't shipped yet? What does that mean for Andy's delivery date?
Brian still has 10 BTC. Used in hand sytems are selling for 4 BTC / 2 Th/s. Andy realizes he's a sucker.