Topic: Reliable comparison between mining vs. buying and holding (Read 4515 times)

Mining is not very much profitable this year as too many miners are looking for their Bitcoins. Mining might be profitable to get Bitcoin Gold and DASH, ZCash. Buying alts and BCC is better — especially when the cryptos are down. Trading as for me is the best variant.

Why would anyone need reliable source for this comparison? This is kind of question which depends on the practical approaches that different investors and miners have made in reality. Now take my example, where I will prefer to invest my money into buying and selling the coins because that is what I like and I can make profit in that way more easily.

When it comes to mining, then I’m not the right guy for it so I don’t and I will never be able to make profits from it. Thus it gets me clear cut idea that mining is not type but the crypto investment is.

So different people different views and for your own decisions you should check your right way to do it.

There's no need to compare the two because both actions will yield the same result - profit. However, if you're going to take at it seriously, mining is quite more complex and difficult compared to buying and holding. Mining requires durable and high equipment and facilities, and cost of electricity to start with. But this can be quite expensive and will need the owner to have adept knowledge in mining. Meanwhile, holding and buying only requires research, money, and a little risk, as well as the ability to read and predict the market chart.

Mining is best to carve own coins but that is time taking process and its requirement is also high whereas investing money and buying a bitcoin is now reliable to most of users because everyone want easier way to earn money and buying is best way those countries who adopted bitcoin in early days their citizens are now mining but those who are getting familiar to it now are preferring buying and investing to earn money.

Minning is not a sure fit process...
You do need to be very damn stable to be able to consider it an option..
Its like in minning you aren't even sure if you are gonna grab the profit tomorrow or not..

As far as holding bitcoins is considered... i don't recommend holding bitcoins for such a long period.. yes it is beneficial for a short while... You should hold ypur bitcoins till.. 4 -5 months then cash them out or a small amount periodically...that way you would never be at a complete loss...

Then the next thing is buying bitcoins.. Buying bitcoins is sometimes very risky... It is beneficial while a dip offcourse.. but... If you plan on buying during a high then there won't be much profit that you would be able to grab...

Also buying works when you think about buying a big amount only... Because buying and selling rates do show a big difference..thus buy during a dip and have plenty to invest and everything will be alright...

Reliable ways to compare these methods no earnings. The profitability of production is constantly changing. It may happen that you will get so much coins to pay for electricity. But as diversification of income sources is the right decision. I have always been a part of their income, investing in the acquisition of the GPU.

 

We can consider the mining and buying as different things. Different rate of earning will always be achieved with these two ways of earning. The fact is simple, in buying and holding everything relies on the market capitalism achievement and decision of big investors being on the same page could lead to generous leads in the revenue. Also, in case of mining you have to bear the indirect cost of the miners, electricity and maintenance but it is eventually surpassed and whatever you from there onwards is your 100% profit. So I believe that both of them are having different ways of getting money back and it depends on us how we manage the whole thing.

Mining is muddled to comprehend as for holding. Holding is straight benefit as following 2-3 months bitcoin cost is clearly going to ascend to a point that you will get attractive benefit from it. Be that as it may, mining regularly is spoken to by organizations as a simple method for profiting which it is yet just if appropriately finished with some keen counts or else you may wind up losing your venture and you won't know how.

IMHO, I believe that it depends on your personality, technical aptitude, and other environmental factors.

- personality: if you don't want to spend any efforts and prefer not to get your hands dirty, then buy and hold is better.

- technical aptitude: if you are not good with a computer, and not very good at innovation, then mining is not for you.

- environmental factors: access to cheap electricity, cold environment where you live, able to import equipment directly from Bitmain, access to reasonable price GPUs, and etc, then mining is for you.

The more efforts that you put into mining, there are more opportunities to maximize your profits with mining.

I think Bitcoin mining and holding/buying will both earn almost the same profit in the end but have different pacing and initial investments. I haven't came across any article comparing the too but based on the factors to start either of the two I think I would prefer to buying/holding than mining because it is costly to start and maintain itself.

Not if mining costs more bitcoins than it generates.

Buying and holding is more profitable and advisable than mining. nowadays mining rig is so expensive so much better if you buy a coins instead of generating bitcoin since the price of GPU's today is so expensive because it is in demand today. and Mining is not profitable if you only have one mining rig you must have a lot of mining rig and also low cost electricity.

 Well if you read the OP, the comparison to be made is mining vs buying and holding not simply buying one time. 
Mining?  Yes, when the price fell for nearly a year from late 2013 to late 2014 it might have been an option but it's no longer a good idea when the price of Bitcoin quadruples in 6 months time.  It's much better to buy and hold in the current situation.  Sorry I don't have time to post all the maths.

now a days bitcoin mining is less profitable because difficulty will increase with increase in price,
buying and holding will be the best option for us, because i see so many people get profit from bitcoin trading.
TBH mining needs  maintenance expenses and electricity expenses also. but in holding we won't have to worry about other expenses instead internet expense.

I don't think you will ever find such a study but it is not too hard to figure out, mining generates bitcoin whereas holding simply grows the value of your bitcoin, therefore if you mine and hold you will always generate more than if you just hold.

I would agree that mining can be promising; however, the operative statement is "if it's still profitable." Many long time miners have tried their hands in trading because the saturation of mine-able coins has decreased greatly, not to mention that the capital you need like electricity, good PC specs, etc. are just as expensive before you can formally mine. On the other hand, trading may be a good way to boost your profit, if you have lots of extra coins to invest. It also has its risks. It actually depends on your gut and your experience.

I would say it's all about preferences and strategy, it's a solid fact that you would be more profitable if you already start mining early and where ROI had been already break-even, rest are just mere profits which is very stable compare to trading - buying/holding counts in this case. Investment on the other hand could generate higher profits in short amount of time if the trend is spotted early or you dipped at the best position.

Comparison? Do a google and you could see everything, but more mining you could visit cryptocompare.com and calculate accordingly, as for charts it's available everywhere and what i can say pros and cons are very subjective to different person. Mining - less risks, long term, guaranteed ROI over a certain period while investing is the opposite if you engage high risks alts trading.

I  am still unsure of this, but I realize that mining can be more profitable if we can get ROi less than a year. so, once ROi is obtained, the next result becomes fixed income. Holding bitcoin is also profitable, but you will not know whether the price will continue to move like this year.

Would it have been better if I had held onto 10 BTC instead of holding half and putting the other half into mining? I don't know, and neither do you. This is my way of diversifying investments. The earnings from mining alone could surpass this if we continue to mine long enough in the future, and the people who get into mining are eyeing on this. It is a calculated risk with cryptocurrency investments at a different level, compared to buying and holding. Likewise, trading cryptocurrencies has its risks at another level. Maybe I didn't enter at a suitable time (close to the start of a new halving era and bitcoin price). As the price of bitcoin climbs to what it is today and a founder pool costs only 0.62 btc at today's rate, mining becomes a viable alternative for accumulation of bitcoin in the long term. But you would have to be part of a large sustainable pool with mining done correctly in the right conditions to have a chance to succeed at this, not mining on your own pointing to a known pool and bearing pool fees and electricity costs and other overheads at your own expense. There are synergistic advantages to being an inherent part of running your own pool, provided it is large enough. Just keep track of BCN's hashrate in the next few months, and if you don't take everything you see at face value and can see the underlying reasons, you will understand why the referral commissions matter. Without a referral incentive in place and without new members contributing hashrates, the crowdfunded setup that BCN is would have failed in its very first few months in 2014.

Well as compare to you I do the saving and for me the bitcoin saving is the best and the price worthy process. Because it is very important to save the bitcoin for the long time as if you will buy the bitcoin today and you will hold the bitcoin for the long time you will know the value of the bitcoin is increasing and you will be able to sell your bitcoin at the high price while you did not buy at the high price so it is the profit.

There is none because most miners hide information regarding profitability of mining rig in reality because of lesser miners means more profit to them. When it comes to mining cryptocurrency the country, the area, the electricity, the hardware and a great coin to fork is the bigger issue. If you think you have that solved mining is better than buying bitcoin.

If we make a comparison in between mining and holding of bitcoins, then we’ll get to know that at the very present moment, it is buying and holding of bitcoins which is having more advantages than that of mining. Mining requires super computer along with huge consumption of power and electricity. You should go for playing a safe game. Buy your bitcoins and keep on holding them for as long as you can.

I see mining to be more practical during the early years of bitcoin since we can get bitcoin for the same cost as our electricity and maintenance of cpus, however in the long run, bitcoin miners were developed and it did cost much more.since it needed much electricity and it needs to run for hours, however if you hodl during that time up until now, you'll see that it is worth it, but i do not suggest mining at this point, and just let the real miners do their job, since minig machines had developed through time and it is much harder to mine these days.at home, since you could only mine fewer bitcoins, well as for buying, it is practical before up until now, but with the value of bitcoin today, you need to know when to buy, and for holding, i still suggest to hold on to your bitcoins and wait until it reaches it peak value.

Mining and Hodling both are totally different practices in my opinion.
Mining require both capital and patience, Miners need to invest a lot of money initially and it takes some time(around 7-8 months to recover the investment and get favourable Return). Also good technical knowledge is required and it also involve maintenance cost in long term.
On the other hand, you can buy or sell BTC at any point of time without any such problem. Not much technical knowledge is required.

End goal of possessing the bitcoin at cost effective way has two main ways to achieve. One is mining and other is purchase-hold. Lets look at the mining and its cost:
* price of miner being used. Based on the which type of miner you are using price will vary.
* Electricity charges applicable in you area or area of interest (The area where you will set up the miner rig)
* Price for place of operation. Either place would be on Rent  thus rent on monthly basis or trimonthly basis.
* AC and or miner place maintenance

profitability of mining based on above factors could calculated fairly accurate with coinwarz calculator. Check following link for the calculation:

https://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency

From a laymans point of view mining is a lot of hassle. For ease of possessing coins purchasing and holding is fairly easy. Above requires in depth knowledge of mining or at least some understanding along with previous experience in mining will be helpful.

If person is technical or is willing to go to great length then mining will be profitable. Or you should focus on purchasing on the coins from market.

It isn't that hard to figure out. If you invested 5 BTC into BCN mining and you ended up with less than 5 BTC, then you have lost money.

You seem to feel that your support of the bitcoin network justifies that loss and I have no problem with that; however, there is a problem when the money losing aspect of BCN mining is hidden from people.

It's a good question obviously, but the answer will vary due to there are some factors to be considered for holders and miners such as:
- unpredictable bitcoin price in the future (even though it's more likely increases over time
- electricity costs for mining
- difficulty adjustments
- taxes
Mining isn't for layman without sufficient funds and skills obviously, it takes months and even years to get ROI.
That's why most people going into holders instead of miners.

I am agree with you because the mining needs the proper equipments to buy and those equipments are very expensive and it takes a lot of the time as well, on the other hand the buying and the saving of the bitcoin is the best option because a lot of the people are buying the bitcoin and they are saving it for the long time because the value and the price of the bitcoin is increasing more and more.

TBH i will preferably Buying and holding bitcoins, because now a days Mining need too much investment needed best hardware with highest Hash rate for eg. Antminer. Mining is also difficult because it needs electricity, proper maintenance of hardware that makes hardware too expensive.

if we compare mining with buying and holding than buying and holding is very easy, just bought and hold and sell when price will high.
but buying and holding is involved risk always.

I would say to do both. For example, if you had the funds to buy 5 btc, I would suggest to put 1.5 btc into mining with a pool like BCN (and the other 3.5 btc into holding) because even though they are not the elite, they build their hashrates from an ever expanding member base from around the world, and they have programmes in place to stay sustainable for some time to come. In about a year or so, the amount of bitcoin mined and paid out, at the price of bitcoin then, should be enough to recover the initial investment, and you can still continue to mine thereafter and earn more than the original 1.5 btc you invested. This was the experience of all members who have been mining for at least one year with BCN in the past three years. Whether they will still be profitable in the next one year from now as they have been in the past, no one can say for sure, but they have mechanisms in place that looks promising enough that they will be mining for years to come.

BUT say, if you only had the funds to buy 1 btc, then you are right, it would make sense to just buy and hold.  

Mining won't already be profitable at this point of time. There's a lot of miners and mining company that put up their mining businesses (I am referring to mining rigs and units, not mining pool and sites) and that will result to a fast increase in total number of available bitcoins and mined bitcoins. As of now, there are already almost 80% of all available bitcoins being mined. After all 21M bitcoins are mined, miners will just earn from transaction fees of every transactions made by bitcoin users. You should also consider that setting up a bitcoin mining sets requires a lot of time and effort, and it will also need electricity which will result to high electricity bill.

For me, buying and holding will be better since bitcoin price is continuously increasing since 2013, and is predicted to double in the next coming years. Also, there are a lot of good altcoins out there that you can buy and hold. Instead of dividing your money to use some of it in buying bitcoin mining machines/rigs/gpus/sets, I'd rather use a part of my money in buying other altcoins and the other part in buying bitcoin.

OK xhomerx10,

I see your point and have made some adjustments to my table to simulate a more realistic projection following a gradual drop in mining earnings with increasing mining difficulty over time. Thanks for highlighting it! I will entertain the idea and assume we have no plans of building bigger hashrates over time (even though we have plans to be Top 5 by next year), and other smaller miners don't fall off and quit from mining due to the increase in mining difficulty in the years that follow.

If this is still not "reliable" (which I think is a pointless term to use in this sort of comparison since all figures are speculative at best), by all means just use a lower figure of your choice, or just buy-hold and don't mine at all. Just remember that for the buy-hold column on the left, the later you buy and hold, the higher the price of bitcoin will be, and if someone were to buy bitcoin at the end of this year if or when 1 btc = $4,000 or $5,000, it would be less than 1 btc on the left column, but the mining column on the right remains the same.

You can view the revised table at the same page at http://www.coinpurveyor.com/buy-hold-vs-mining-bitcoin/.
I have retained the same conservative estimate of 1 btc = $50,000 by 2024, instead of $500,000 or $1 million as some people would like to think. Again, feel free to use higher numbers here that seem more probable to you, but you will notice that just using 1 btc = $100,000 in 2024 now brings us back to the earlier end figures in my original table with constant returns yearly (which is why I think "reliable" is a pointless term and why my tables were just supposed to show the advantages and merits of mining over buy-hold and not how much dollars you can potentially make).

Now, let's go through your concerns one by one:

1. Our so-called "cloud" mining site allows members to opt out from the programme and reclaim their mining hardware by writing in officially. The individually-numbered mining hardware will then be unplugged and delivered to the member. You can't do this with a real cloud mining site like Genesis or Hashing24. Call it cloud if it suits you (or maybe calling it "vapour mining" to differentiate from the other usual cloud mining sites), but members who buy the Founder Pool own their own hardware which they can reclaim at any time. To my knowledge, no one has ever done that in the 3 years since BCN started mining as it would be quite silly to do so, because no one has lost money mining with BCN since its inception in August 2014. As far as I know.

2. My site didn't mention or explain anything about margins, that's because the btc per year figures quoted are net earnings to the members, after all the overheads have been deducted. In the screenshot of my earnings which you have attached in your post, you can see that my total earnings to-date is about 0.98 btc (earned), and the net is about 0.57 btc (paid). The difference in between is the amount deducted for the overheads you're concerned about like electricity, maintenance, commissions, site staff salary (we have about 6 or 7 technicians on payroll if I am not mistaken), but above all else, INCLUDING...

3. ...repurchases set aside for future hardware upgrades. As I have mentioned in one of my earlier posts, since BCN started mining, they have upgraded from the AntMiner S3 to the S4, S5, S7 and currently S9, all without further capital reinjection from members. This arrangement is made possible because of the repurchases set aside. We always foresee the need to upgrade when the time comes, and it is compulsory for all members to set aside part of their earnings for this. No exemptions are made, because if some do and some don't, the whole pool will cease to be profitable prematurely. We personally know of individual miners who sneered at our programme and preferred mining on their own, only to come back months later and mine with us. The power of the repurchases and compulsory upgrades cannot be downplayed, and it is what makes BCN sustainable and one of the top mining pools today. To elaborate a little, our mining hardware is immediately upgraded the moment the existing one becomes obsolete, which are quickly sold off on the second hand market while they still hold some value to recoup some of the costs. We have an arrangement with the manufacturer where we are offered the first right of refusal for all hardware manufactured, before they are sold to the open market. Our hashrates are also guaranteed by the manufacturer themselves, who deploy their own staff to assist with the management of the pool. Our minimum hashrates are guaranteed, and any downtime or malfunction is handled by the manufacturer with their own resources to maintain that minimum hashrate. Also, it is these repurchases set aside that allow partial shares to be bought and accumulated over time, effectively keeping the "contract" perpetual even after the expiry of the first 1,000 days.

Some 200 of our members from around the world made a trip to Iceland to visit the mine a few weeks ago, and were given some of the older unsold AntMiner S5 miners to take home as souvenir.

Some of the discussion above may be found at:
http://www.coinpurveyor.com/benefits-of-joining-bitclub-network/ and
http://www.coinpurveyor.com/faq-bitcoin-mining-bcn/

          As far as i am concerned, if you have that resources that you can go ajd make a mining rigs then its up to the person and if at the same time he is also trading or something else like that, would it be bad also? It is not about comparing which is better just for the sake of other peoples opinion, when they can even do both as long as they can keep up and earn from their resources.

xhomerx10,

I saw that link you posted as well as some other negative reviews about BCN before I joined them and upon doing my research for about a week, I came to the conclusion that nothing in those articles were true. This was also confirmed once I was in BCN after a few months and knew in greater detail how they operated. BCN used to point their hash powers to a well-known cloud mining company in the earlier days but since becoming large enough, they now run and managed their own pools with hardware belonging to members. There are also some claims about BCN being a ponzi, which is not true. Only members know better. But you didn't say BCN is a ponzi, so I am going to let it slide.

A list of well-known cloud mining companies may be found on this list: https://bitcoinworldwide.com/mining/cloud-mining/

On my table of comparisons, I have stated that "mining difficulties change with time, and some variations and range can be expected throughout its course". When we started in January this year and BTC hits its ATH of $1,300, the daily figures fell slightly. When China announced their capital controls shortly after that, we saw as much as twice the number of bitcoin mined each day, although it resumed back to its usual average in the weeks that follow.

We know that mining difficulty is constantly increasing, that is a given - but that doesn't mean some miners won't fall out of the race along the way and allow the larger miners a higher portion of the bitcoin released into circulation. We went from obscurity to currently at Top 10 to 15 and have been for over a year now, and hope to achieve Top 3 to 5 by next year. Only time can tell if we will make it. No ROIs are guaranteed and my article made it clear about that. It also stated that you may "feel free to use your own projection in the calculation". The article is also meant to illustrate that when you buy and hold a bitcoin, you never really know when you are going to sell. But when you do, when you feel that the price is right, you no longer hold any bitcoin for future capital appreciation. Compared to mining, whenever you choose to sell your holdings for whatever reason, you will still continue to receive your proceeds from mining, assuming the mining operation is still profitable and sustainable then. If you don't like my figure of 1.2 btc, then just replace it with something lower, like 0.6 or 0.8. Mining does have its advantages, but it does carry some risks as well. And we all know what those risks are...come on, we're talking about cryptocurrencies here. If you want safe, put your money in the bank and just earn 3% interest p.a.

Still, I would recommend that people do both buying and holding, and mining, as I concluded in that article.

Mining cryptocurrency is having a physical asset that will give you a chance to earn different kinds of coins that is mine-able by your hardware and you can choose whichever coin you want to mine while in the buying and holding part is you only relying to what will market reacts to a positive or negative side of it. both of this kind of things is worth it if you invest not only your money but your time in learning the different kinds of techniques so that you will not end up broke.

But mining is problematic. You won't mine forever or until 2146 with the same mining equipment, the difficult is constantly increasing, also there are extra costs if you are mining physically, on the cloud it becomes worse as the ROI takes too much time to happen or it may never happen.

Let's say with $5000 I buy 1 Bitcoin. But with the same $5000 investment in mining I'm not able to get 1 Bitcoin from it.

Mining has got lot many requirements and different governments have provided with different stepped process to make it efficient. With buying and holding, all that required is the patience to hold. More the time iin the wallet more will be the profiting.

 It's because of the Ponzi-like nature of the club.  You have to sign people up and prey on their prey.
 It's multi-level bullshit using a pittance of mining for the illusion of credibility.  It's totally unsustainable but the top-level fucks are raking in the cash from the morons signing up, hence the trip to Iceland.
Too bad people are so gullible.

I believe with a million dollars in capital you're better off buying down 400 bitcoins at the current prevailing rates and I'm hopeful you'll be able to sell and make good returns before the end of the year. It's just not practical to mine and make returns currently as the difficulty rate is on an ever increasing level.

Yes noictib,

We do it in Iceland precisely for those reasons.   

Exactly, it makes every sense now to buy and hold rather than mine because you cannot easily beat the prevailing mining competition. It belongs to the elite and more powerful people with powerful hashing mines all over the world so wil advice all entry level miners to rather invest by buying down bitcoins.

xhomerx10,

We are not cloud mining. We have our own mining pool with a constantly expanding hashrate as the crowdfunded community grows daily. Nobody said it would be profitable to cloud mine bitcoin. In fact, nearly all the people we know who tried cloud mining didn't end up being happy at the very end.

Contrary to what you have said, there are people in our mining community (and I will say it again - we are not cloud mining) who have mined for more than those 1000 days, as the programme has an automated repurchasing of partial shares in place that keeps the contract perpetual. The decision to increase this repurchase amount from the bitcoin you earn daily is in your control which you may set and change at any time. All members who have mined for more than a year in the past have recovered their initial investments, and are mining on pure profits now. So 1000 days is what you begin with, and as you mine and allow the programme to run its repurchase to pay for electricity, maintenance, and increase of partial shares, your original share of 1 will be replenished after the end of the 1000 days. This effectively keeps the contract perpetual. What is more important is, the repurchase allows funds to be kept aside for the future upgrading of mining hardware the moment the new model of AntMiner is released, without further reinjection of capital from members. This arrangement cannot be underestimated for a long term sustainable mining operation and it's something you don't get mining with your own rig at home. Over the years we have upgraded from the S3 to the S4, S5, S7 and now S9, and have seen other miners around the world come and go on the hashrate distribution chart. BitMain maintains our pools and guarantees us a minimum hashrate in performance, so downtime is not something we worry about. Our mining blocks are available for public viewing at https://blockchain.info/blocks/BitClub%20Network, which is updated every 10 minutes.

The 0.1 btc per month are my personal actual mining figures from mining for less than 6 months for one of my accounts. I have a few contracts mining currently. I have just screenshot my pool earnings as of today and attached it here at . Whether I will continue to receive 0.1 btc per month, you and I don't know. It may be less, it may be more. But based on records of other miners in the community in the past few years, the monthly figures have been consistent even with the ever increasing mining difficulty since Mt Gox. Members earned about 2 to 3 btc per year before the last halving, and in my opinion 1.0 to 1.2 btc per year in the current halving era is quite realistic as my own records show. But there are no guarantees in life. You can only rely on past records, look at current conditions, and make an analysed projection for the future. After all, everything in cryptospace is such - otherwise you and I would have poured our entire life savings into mining or buying bitcoin yesterday. Which I don't. But I do both buying and mining, and place about 3 times in mining than I do in buying and holding.

At the end of the day, I can only show you my own figures and relay some facts about our previous records and performance. You will have to do your own research, look at your own risk-aversion, and see if this is for you. Nobody is arm-twisting you to participate. I am only offering an alternative to those who wish to consider mining without all the hassle of own maintenance and downtime, or concerns about upgrading when the time comes. Because you will have to upgrade when that time comes to cope with the mining difficulty, and most miners will have trouble reinvesting funds to replace a large rig or farm. We already have that planned for and funds set aside for that for each and every member. And that is why we have also seen DIY miners who didn't initially believe in our programme eventually quit doing it from home and joining us a year later, precisely for that reason. 
 

 We aren't talking about the option of putting money into a "safe" investment here so patronizing me by telling me to put my money in the bank is unproductive.  The thread topic is "Reliable comparison between mining vs. buying and holding" and that's what OP wants to know.  You don't give us enough information to do a reliable comparison of the two and neither does your site.  In fact, you are misrepresenting what a person can make by purchasing a contract on your cloud mining site.  This is why I contradicted you initially - to warn OP away from BCN.
 There is not enough margin in mining to be able to share the reward in the way your site explains.  You have to buy the equipment initially, the equipment becomes obsolete and must be replaced due to difficulty increases, you have to pay for electricity (the cheaper power in Iceland enables slightly longer useful life of the miner), you have to pay referral commissions and you have to pay costs associated with maintaining the site and its staff.  Show us your real figures and let us do the proper, reliable comparison for OP.

 

Right now the mining too has got more difficulty. It's good to buy and hold, but the one time spending on mining equipment provides a sustained earning, even when the price increases one gain the same amount in terms of bitcoin. But while buying what we spend simply varies between the time. Else as mentioned mining altcoins and then buying bitcoin with that is quite a good plan.

That is true, or perhaps you should mine Altcoins and have them sold for bitcoins if you're able to meet some of the factors you've listed above. Mining is indeed becoming elitist and belongs to a selected few so it's better to realize the competition and rather buy and hold.

 You ARE cloud mining.  You own the equipment, you run the pools, you control the horizontal and you control the vertical - the only way in is by contract.  This is the definition of cloud mining.    

 Let me assure you that I know you won't continue to receive your 0.1 Bitcoin per month which means that only you don't know.  It will be less and less with nearly each and every difficulty retarget.  The difficulty has doubled in the last 180 days so any contract you purchased in January will be producing half what it was at that time already - 180 days in.

 Let's assume that neither you nor I know whether you will continue to receive 0.1 BTC per month.  If that's true, then how can you tell people to invest $3500 (plus $99 membership fee) with you today and they will have 3.6 BTC three years from now which will be worth more than the bitcoins I might have bought earlier in 2017 with that same $3600?
  
Here's a screen cap of BCN's "table" to refresh your memory:


 So you and I aren't able to do the math but BCN is capable of doing so?  Come on man.
 
You're not only offering an alternative to people who would rather have you do all the work, you are promising greater wealth through mining over buying and holding - which is misleading at best.

Here's some interesting research into BCN

 https://99bitcoins.com/anatomy-bitcoin-scam-bitclub-network-analyzed/

 Don't get scammed.

Buying and holding have much more possibility of earning than mining because when you bought gpus for your mining rig then it already costs a lot of money while if you just diversify it on different good altcoins then you can easily grow it or double it within a month while in mining it will take a lot of months before you reach your ROI and also the price of coins are not fix so it is hard to tell when is your ROI.

Correct!

The millions $USD part in capital - that's handled in a crowdfunded arrangement and setup in our community.
The rest of the features you mentioned - near-free electricity, cool climate, technical expertise, first access to the latest ASICs - we have those all in place.

Having said that, it is also advisable to buy and hold some BTC.

You need to mine if you need Bitcoin as the main method is mining in order to get your hands on some coins, when some body needs to quickly make a deal using a decentralized currency they will have to buy in bulk from the market and send it to the recipient, for example when some body wants to buy or pay for something that under normal circumstances they couldn't use the banking system, they could buy and use then.
However it is the same whether you buy it or mine it but it's better if you start mining it for yourself and keep the coins for the times when you need to do business to avoid going to exchanges and buying expensive coins since when you try to buy more than a few the price will start to increase exponentially.

 You can't earn 1.2 bitcoins in each of 3 successive years with cloud mining contract - the difficulty increases will make it impossible.  If it were so profitable to cloud mine Bitcoin, don't you think EVERYONE would already be doing it?  1000 day contracts are absolutely useless - no miner will last the difficulty changes for that long a period of time and the maintenance fees will eat up your profit long before the 1000 days are up.

 Stay away from this huckster OP!  He's not being forthright in his claims.

Hi Oralmat, precisely! What you have quoted is very true these days. And that is why the mining that I do, it is done at a location where electricity is cheap, and plans are in place to upgrade the moment it becomes necessary, or even mandatory. Most miners don't stay long in the game because they lack the funds to upgrade when that moment comes, and that upgrading step is critically crucial to continue mining.

Buying and holding is also a good option, but many people feel that this was best done when bitcoin was much lower in price e.g. below US$1,000. With the current price of bitcoin these days, you can get a mining contract with all the benefits mentioned above for the price of a little over 1 btc, which you can potentially recover in USD in one to one-and-a-half years. This is because the returns are dependent upon 2 factors - the amount of bitcoin accumulated through mining, AND the price of bitcoin at any given moment. Hence, while 1 btc may be worth $2,500 today, if you manage to mine 0.5 btc in the next 6 months and the price of bitcoin then is $5,000, then you would have recouped that $2,500 (0.5 x $5,000).

The only difference between buy-hold and mining is, with buy-hold, once you sell your bitcoin to realise your capital appreciation, you will no longer hold any bitcoin for future appreciation, and you would have to buy new bitcoin at the price then, assuming you don't have any left. With mining, after you sell all your bitcoin from mining, you will continue to mine for more bitcoin for future appreciation, though I gather this time it will be less given the halving and increasing mining difficulty. But it doesn't matter, because bitcoin price would have been higher then, and you would be getting these bitcoin for free since you have recovered your initial investment. In our programme, the costs for all electricity, maintenance and future upgrades are derived from small quantities of bitcoins accumulated daily and apportioned aside, so no further reinjection of funds is necessary along the way.

The figures as tabulated at http://www.coinpurveyor.com/buy-hold-vs-mining-bitcoin/ are actual figures I have received to date. Of course, what will happen in one year, 5 years and 10 years from now, no one really knows.

I think we don't need to go at any place tow examine whether to buy the Bitcoin directly or mine and then hold .
Here I will say that ofcourse you need to buy directly instead to waste your time for the mining because mining is not profitable for every place  .
But if you are from the China country then I would like to suggest that you to mine the Bitcoin because mining of the bitcojnnis profitable in the China , but if you want start your business with Bitcoins and you need Bitcoin amount to start then instead to go for the mining , direct buybis more better idea for everyone .
So all the will depend upon your location and need and conditions .

Actually it is dependent upon number of factors. If you have access to free or near-free electricity, cool climate, Millions $USD in capital, technical expertise and first access to the latest ASICs. Then yes mining is profitable. If not, you are almost certainly better off just buying and holding BTC.

It is true that it is quite pointless to buy an ASIC miner and mine from home today. Overheads alone from electricity and cooling alone may outweigh your profits from mining, and your own hashrates may not be high enough to compete with the bigger miners around the world, resulting in much lower mining earnings than expected. These days, the best way to mine is to join a large mining pool - a pool large enough with a combined higher hashrate where all members of the pool pull their resources and work together to stand a better chance at validating a block. I am currently doing that with BitClub Network (BCN), in summary, for the following important reasons:

1. BCN's mining farm is located in Iceland where electricity tariff is low due to the use of geothermal and hydroelectric power. This significantly reduces overhead, leaving more of your bitcoin earned to be kept as profit. Cooling is provided naturally by the cool ambient air.

2. BCN is given a guaranteed hashrate by the manufacturer of AntMiner S9 that they currently use, which means that if there is any drop in hashrates or downtime in machines, additional resources are deployed to keep the hashrate at the agreed number. This sort of arrangement is not possible if you were to mine with your own rig, and you would need to constantly monitor its performance for downtime.

3. BCN is doing actual mining as can be verified on the blockchain.info website on the hashrate distribution chart for major miners across the world. The crowdfunded community is constantly growing with an increasing capacity in combined hashrate, with mining carried out with actual mining hardware. There are companies out there who claim to be doing mining but who don't actually possess or run their own machines, and some even go as far as to use the bitcoin phenomenon to capitalise on the gullibility of the public, without doing any actual mining at all.

4. One of the most important aspect of BCN's operation, which cannot be downplayed or underestimated, is their program for repurchases. This allows the current batch of mining hardware to be replaced and upgraded to the latest version when it becomes available, in order for the community as a whole to remain relevant in the mining race against other miners around the world. The older machines are sold off in the second hand market. This arrangement is possible without reinjection of funds by members, due to a repurchase plan and earnings apportionment that sets aside bitcoins mined for future use, equipment maintenance, and purchase of partial shares that keep the contract perpetual. Without this in place, the community as a whole would not be able to mine profitably and sustainably in the long term.

5. BCN has referral and compensation plans that allow members to build residual incomes, but only if they choose to want to do so. Earning bitcoins with BCN does not require members to do this, and most members are quite content with parking and sitting and earning bitcoins over time without doing much else. However, the compensation plans are there for those who wish to build. This building portion cannot be underestimated as well, as with this incentive for members to spread the word about bitcoin, BCN has been instrumental in bringing awareness about bitcoin and cryptocurrency to many parts of the world. If the price of bitcoin increases due to supply and demand, and from mass adoption or public awareness, then BCN is playing a small role contributing to that.

6. BCN has other cryptocurrency-related projects which they have and may introduce along the way. A more detailed description of the advantages and benefits of mining with BCN is provided at http://www.coinpurveyor.com/benefits-of-joining-bitclub-network/ and http://www.coinpurveyor.com/faq-bitcoin-mining-bcn/.

With bitcoin price often hitting all-time highs in the recent months, mining may still be a viable (and cost effective) option for anyone to accumulate bitcoin for future value appreciation.

For more information on getting started with bitcoin mining with BCN, kindly forward your queries to [email protected].

To compare the two, mining is the process by which transactions are verified and added to the public ledger, known as the block chain, and also the means through which new bitcoin are released according to investopedia which would only be profitable if you have a good mining rig or mining setup to begin with. Buying and Holding on the other hand is a passive investment strategy in which an investor buys and holds the bitcoin bought for a long period of time, regardless of fluctuations in the market according to investopedia again and is typically more profitable than mining most of the time unless you have a very good equipment for mining and a source of cheap electricity.

Actually I have a different experience between mining vs buying and holding. Because i have not listen for any people who arguing for mining and opposed to buying and holding. Even i hear a opposite for the people who think that buying and holding is much better and everyone could do it easily than mining. Because only big professional investors can do mining and only when they start to mining if in their country they have a lowest electricity.

I think it is more convenient to buy bitcoin instead of mining nowadays because it is so simple that when you buy a hardware for you to mine the return of investment is so long or even no at all.

Instead of investing a $1k in mining then bought it with Bitcoin now and wait just like what will you do in mining but in holding bitcoin you don't need to spend electricity cost and maintaining cost.

You speak the truth, but why not combine all these types of earnings? It can bring good result and diversifitsirovat risks. Though of course it all depends on starting capital which you can use to earn money.

Mining was an important source of earning bitcoins earlier when it was easily mined using CPU but now its not that easy.Mining is still profitable but for that,you have to invest to buy powerful ASICs and also,you have to check your local electricity charges for profitable mining.But for investing,you could even invest a small amount in bitcoins and hold it.In mining,you could be able to get a steady income.But in holding bitcoins,your earnings depends on the price variations in bitcoin.

Hi Eric Mu, there are a couple of scenarios tabulated here in this article at http://www.coinpurveyor.com/buy-hold-vs-mining-bitcoin/ based on actual mining figures in the last 6 months to one year, and some conservative forecasts based on recent speculations about bitcoin price reaching a certain figure in the next few years.

While I personally believe the benefits of mining to be very valid, I think it also pays to buy some and hold. For me, the ratio of mining to buy-hold is about 75:25. I place about 3 times more money in mining than I do buying and holding, especially with the price of bitcoin these days, as the tables in the article gave a comparison as well.

Mining bitcoina means machine cooling staff ,taking care of it and looking after it day after day .buying is more and holding it for a long time ,as if u hold it for a long time u might end up having a lot of bitcoins in the future.

If i'm be a part of mining party, i will choose to mining some altcoin too, but i prefer to research first the coin for future plan, means it can be worth to mining then dump or/ hold it for better price to earn more bitcoin(this need a lot research, but probably worth) or just be a sh*t coin for developer profit purpose only.

I think mining and buying/HOLD is basically same kind, both as investment, just the way make it different, buy directly is more safe but also the risk is price itself, this case is actually returned to their respective self.

mining bitcoin has more risk but mining altcoin and dump for bitcoin, which is effectively the same thing, is a much better investment than buying, because you generate bitcoin while keeping the value of your machines, that can be sold at any time to have almost everything back, for me it's far better than buying, but perhaps it's slower as a way to accumulate bitcoin

By simply looking at bitcoin's price history, you can already see that price grew by 75% compare to december 2015 and by that alone you can already assume buy and hold strategy was the better investment against bitcoin mining already, because there's no maintenance cost, no time consuming monitor needed, etc.

I think both alternatives can provide an income and profit if you know what you doing.

In the case of buying and hold, you simply buy them and hope the price will claim in order to make a profit. The second point with mining, you need to make an investment in equipment and electricity before to do a break even before to start to make a profit.

I think the best option, should to buy them with you own money and wait.

From what I know no one created comparison between mining and buying. I imagine it would be extremely hard, what are the rules of this comparison?

Would buying BTC and holding it for a year, two, five will be better than investing money, time and effort into mining?

Do we want to convert BTC to FIAT in the end or when BTC price will spike up? Cost of electricity varies from place to place, there are too many individual factors too...

At this point it is safe to assume that mining BTC is dead for ordinary people.

trading buying hold selling, and repeat can high profit and return
is comare in mining, mining high cost, electicity, reduce hadware performance, and high price in tool mining
if cloud mining is very high risk and low return, high risk because in very dificult can find cloud mining in real mining
so trading if the best choise to high return investment but must have skill

Since both of them are investments that will need to have bigger amount of capital, those people who are comparing it are those are speculating and saying that mining is not profitable anymore.

So in alternative, they prefer to buy bitcoins and just hold it for a long time. Because in mining, if you don't have mining rig, you need to invest with it and as well as the consumption of electricity.

But with holding, many of the people here prefer this to do because this investment doesn't require too much effort.

Chances are, if you're already asking here it means you were unable to source the answers yourself. Of this is the case then you are far better off buying bitcoins if the idea is to hold them for long-term profit.

Bear in mind that the miners making profit are very technically knowledgeable, have a significant capital and are willing to put in time and further cost commitment.

Only consider mining if you have the patience, time and capital.

these are not two things that you can compare. buying and holding is an investment that is easy and needs you to know some stuff about trading too. but it doesn't need much work to be profitable.
but mining is more like a long term investment that you have to work on it to make it profitable. and most people say choose buy and hold instead of mining because mining with the difficulty increase and electricity cost and the competitive nature of it is getting harder and harder and for most people the electricity bill is enough to make it a loss.

in the end it is up to you to calculate things and see if you can make it work and by how much.

I can't agree with your impression. I tend to read a lot more people giving advice against mining as opposed to simple buy and hold. And so would I. Nowadays, Bitcoin mining is profitable only for professionals with state of the art mining equipment and cheap electricity costs.

A general comparison between the two is hardly possible however, because all relevant factors vary greatly. You have to take into account electricity costs, mining difficulty and the efficiency of your miners. So you can calculate profitability only for a number of scenarios, not in a general sense.

What can be said with a high degree of certainty however is that the majority of home ASIC miners would have been better off directly buying Bitcoin. Delivery delays and inadequate performance of mining hardware had a huge negative impact for many.

ya.ya.yo!

Yes I understand and that is quite obvious - I was wondering if there is any statistical evidence. Something a little more specific

Assuming you have a situation where you can mine bitcoins profitably, then mining may give you a better return than simply buying them. On the other hand, mining is much more risky.

To determine mining returns in the past, you can use past equipment and electricity costs to determine mining costs, and compare those to mining income determined from historical difficulty data.

I constantly hear people arguing for mining as opposed to buying and holding or vice versa as better investment strategy - is there any reliable source of information that compares the two over an extended period of time?