Also consider this, if you were mining with marginal electricity rates - then maybe upgrading to Volta cards might make sense. Now would be a great time to dump those old 280X, 390X and RX 470s. You will be missing out on 4 months of mining, but nothing is stopping you from buying the coins when they get dumped. It was easy to buy ETH below $210 in December (it stayed below that price on 2 different days). You could have scooped up almost 4 ETH for the price of a high end 1080Ti and you would have made enough profit if you sold at $1400 to build 1/2 a rig of 1080Tis (well, if you could find them now lol). Nobody knows when the market will launch other than whales who create waves.
If you're crazy you can even buy the proverbial shitcoin with money, but that's pretty much gambling to me. That's where I feel comfortable only mining - most I lose is electricity (I don't harp about what a could have mined instead).
Having some liquidity in some exchanges during times like this a great way to help diversify your income stream.
Couple of things:
-No one knows what Volta's will be like for mining more importantly at what price point. While I love a 90Mh/s or 1000 sol/s card Im not paying 3500 for it. I'd rather mine with a predictable output than bank on a "maybe it will be feasible"
-Hindsight is always 20/20; no one can predict the future.
-Buying through exchanges is great as long as the coin grows 2x-3x every other month. If not you're better off mining. So you hedge your bets. Doing both is the best approach for most ppl.
-Dont buy shit coins but keep a certain percentage of what you mine to take advantage of market booming; sell the rest to pay electricity and initial capital invested.
If the market tanks (and those coins in your exchange are worthless) you have your gpus to bank on rather than losing everything i.e. damage limitation.
how are people still able to source hardware?
Keep checking often and bookmark the webpages. Local slightly used places like craiglist and other options like ppl selling their rigs is a great way to get a good bargain.
-The Volta information is out for the prosumer level, not for the consumer level. Until more specs are out we can't extrapolate a hash per card
-Buying through an exchange is a pain in the butt, especially in the US (not as bad as when I had to wait 1 month to transfer money through Dwolla to Mt Gox, but still bad). Coin growing 2x to 3x per month? You new kids have no perspective. Very few coins were actually worth mining besides in the times when they were launched. Oddly, the coins the coins that were best to be mined are the ones that many consider dead like BCN or BBR. All the other successful coins would have actually realized greatest gains if purchased at an exchange early on. But again getting an exchange to not screw you over (Mt Gox, Cryptsy, Vicurex...) is a risk that miners do not have to deal with.
A R9 390 costs about $300 - that would have bought about 38K ETH. It would never have been able to mine that amount even if POS doesn't arrive for a decade. But as you say hindsight is 20/20. Mining always leaves you with the hedge if ETH became trash. Only crazy people buy life savings level of crypto - look at Roger Ver - he's crazy and he's rich. I can't think of any miner that can roll on him... not even James Gibson (gigavps).
Personally, I'm past hedging. I see Jamie Dimon as the spawn of Satan. I'm going all in on crypto and my mining farm is strictly to keep me from getting in trouble (that's what my wife thinks).