Hi Dance
There is a point that you aren't take into consideration, you could sell your hash at any moment, so even with GHS prices falling if they take more than 254 days to reach 0 you will have that sell as an earning.
Depending of difficulty increase, BTC prices and so on you could made profit.
Agree with you that is too risky with S4 at current prices but isn't impossible
Actually I've had put some buy orders that trigger with half prices and already traded some S3 hash with very good profit
^This^
Not everyone has a buy and hold mentality, they play it on a day to day basis based on daily yield, and then trading back on the market.
I agree it may not be the best investment in the long run, but there are ways to speculate, and still make profit. Although with BTC prices staying around this $230 level, and the difficulty rising faster those windows are closing on the S3 and S4 in Hashnest.
I agree on the trading aspect, I have done pretty good trading them and have been very happy. Using their API, I had built a bot that made money a very high percentage of the time, that has work out great. However, I don't trade the EOL miners, I was really specifically referring to only those EOL guys (S4/S3).
Trading the EOL miners, it is really dangerous. Low liquidity and a quickly sinking ship that puts way to much downward pressure on the price. The price just isn't stable enough on those EOL guys. Since there is no way to short them, trading the EOL miners takes more guts than I have!
Like I said before, if there was only a way to short those EOL miners. Man, that is the way to go!!! I have even given some thought to building an exchange, just so I could short the EOL miners hehehehe...
The miners that still have some life on them (S5/S7), trading them I think is great. Just be careful when they get EOL...
Thanks for engaging my question guys. I wish someone could really explain the price to me, but there is not really any valid explanation for the current value (if people were *only* trading them then I imagine they would be trading at a much lower value as the people that are buying them and holding them are the ones pushing up the price). There must be some other thing going on, such as where people paid a high price for them so they are not willing to sell at anything other than a higher price. What makes no sense to me is I would rather loose just part of my investment (and sell them at a lower price) than hold out for a high price (and in the end loose almost all of my investment). Or maybe people just buy them and forget about selling them, I don't know...
Overall, investing (and specifically trading) the newer hardware is great. Those EOL ones just have such limited legs on them that they should be about 1/5 of the current price. Well, I imagine over the next 30 days the price will drop in half (.0002 range), 30 days later they will be in the .0001 range, etc... However none of those prices will make any sense at those times. The miners will just get turned off in a bit and the people holding them at that time will get nothing for them.