Never saw the attraction of mining. Always appeared like a race to the bottom where you were pitting yourself against giants. I guess that it had worked so well for hodlers in the past was the motivation to not outright buy?
when i started mining in 2011 it was easier to acquire btc by gpu mining than buying.
as im a hardware guy who likes to tinker, i never really stopped except for a year or two around 2013-14. that was when asics really took hold. asics were pretty much a suckers game except for 1st batch folks (assuming they werent outright scammed). then around when eth mining with gpus became profitable i got back in. trading eth for btc of course.
something about that soothing white noise from the fans and the tweaking that just gets me.
and now i have squirrel acorn fpga gpu accelerators to (hopefully?) breath new life into my aging gpu rigs. plus an bcu1525 fpga on order that may or may not come anywhere near making roi, but will at least be fun to play with.
for me, mining as a hobby is a lot safer than some of my other much more expensive hobbies. and some of
those hobbies tend to cause death or other undesirable results when you screw up. so there is that advantage.