It would be better IMO to just buy some bitcoin now while price is low and cash out when it rises and keep trading like that. Buy low sell high.☺
Completely agree.
I was a miner back when GPU (and, initially, even CPU) mining was possible. I bought a high-end graphics card, and mined a lot of BTC. Back then, people warned that I'd be better off simply buying the coins. With hindsight, they were right. I sold a lot of BTC to pay for the GPU and the increased electricity bill (I was making at best 50 BTC every 4 days or so - but that was when BTC was around $1).
Mining was a lot of fun. Despite not making as much as I could have done if I'd simply bought the BTC, I learned a lot and still have some coins left over. Difficulty is a killer - it makes ROI calculations far more complex, and it makes ROI much less likely while it increases exponentially. I learned to shave any cost off, to increase efficiency wherever I could. I solo-mined a long time before moving to pools, because pools added a new layer of inefficiency (the pool takes a commission).
I always had control of my hash-power. If a pool had stiffed me (it never happened) I could easily have moved to another pool, and lost very little.
I guess what few BTC I have cost me too much (I value them too highly) to risk them lightly. When I want to increase my BTC I buy them outright - it's far easier, far less risky. I
do speculate sometimes - but it's with a fraction of my total coins, and it's always on an exchange I trust (and that trust can be removed), and I always have a reasonably good assessment of the risk/reward ratio! I think it's fascinating that markets for hash-power have emerged, but it's a pity there are so many poor efforts and blatant scams. Hopefully that'll improve as the industry matures. I hope those people who have been let down by Scrypt.cc are more fortunate in future - if nothing else they've had an excellent education in warning signs and red flags, and should find incompetents and scammers easier to spot.
