This is a valid hypothetical scenario... but only one of a thousand different hypothetical scenarios. What happens if you buy a coin, and it never goes back to the price that you bought it for?
Then you are in the same boat as the hypothetical miner above who invested $2400 to mine the same coin, however by holding a coin you can cut your losses a lot quicker than a miner can.
That's not the scenario for miners at all. Miners don't have a price point for the coin to wait for... they can either dump for profits now, to offset their capital investment, or hold and wait for higher prices at any time. At no time does a miner operate at a "loss" except when electricity costs more than the revenue the mining is bringing in.
I am not against mining or am I against trading as I do both. However, there is a time to do one or the other and getting into mining right now just isn't a good investment. Early this year it was a good investment, simply because the run-up in prices in virtual every coin. So now we have this big group of people who either bought a bunch of mining gear and got rich, who maybe held a lot of coins (almost anything) and became rich, and those who first invested into cryptocurrency (again almost anything) and become rich. So most of the people we see posting really never went through the bad times, they have only seen good times where almost any decision right or wrong has paid off since everything has went up so dramatically.
This is very true. I think Alan Greenspan called it "irrational exuberance" prior to the markets crashing in 2008.
So now myself and a few others try to inject some reason into to all these "you can't lose money" type of posts but are just meant with ridicule and disdain. Yeah, everyone wants to party to keep going and easy money to keep flowing in, but at some point you really need to sit down, do the calculations, the real ones and not rosy "if the price shoots up I will be golden" type ones, and come to your own conclusions. Markets do have boom and bust cycles and mining follows along with that but also has unique dynamics all its own.
And I agree with a little bit of sanity checking... my only disagreement is when people say just buying the coin is a better way, and they don't take the full life cycle of a miner into account when trying to show the calculations. Ignoring resale of equipment is not painting the correct picture between mining versus just buying a coin.
As I type this the mining difficulty for most popular coins continues to rise even with the recent downtrend in price. This means even if prices recover, the amount of coins a given hash-rate can produce will be less than it was in the past. So prices not only need to recover, they need to go up enough to offset the increase in difficulty that has occurred in the meantime. This would mean Ethereum would probably need to hit $500-$600 to even remotely return to recent mining profitability numbers. So eventually one way or another the mining glory days will come to a halt, either by a sustained market downtrend or after a complete saturation of network hash-rate.
People have been saying this about Bitcoin for years now, but people still mine it for a profit. Granted, the barrier to entry is a lot higher now, as you have to continuously purchase better and better ASICs. But, as long as there are PoW coins, there will be miners.