This is a million $ question , pretty hard to answer and does depend on many factors, but thought I'd share my personal experience here , after having read this
Time for aggressive expansion is when pricing is low to lowest.
I want to validate whether this statement is valid or not.
on March of 2019 I made this topic >
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.50064209 , I was bascially wondering if I should use all my
BTC to buy mining gears.
took me a while to decide, got the gears around end of April / start of May.
BTC price was at about 5k , the miners did cost me about 250$ each as oppose of 200$ because I couldn't meet the MOQ for that 200$ price as i decided not to go all in (something I do regret a bit)
so I will make a simple a calculation here to demonstrate whether I made a good or bad move in terms of profit , first we need a few numbers to work with
1- Miner cost in btc = 250$/5000$ = 0.05
BTC2-Average Income to date (2 months) = 0.027
BTC not 100% accurate but pretty close
3-Current Miner price ( if want to sell today) = 500$/11600$ = 0.043
BTCtotal
BTC value as of today = 3+2 = 0.043 + 0.027 = 0.07
BTC made of 0.05
BTC with a net profit of
0.02 BTC or 250$ turned to 812$
too good to be true ? yes indeed because simply there is no power bill in the calculation, and I haven't sold any of the
BTC earning. but let's do the same calcs and pretend I was paying 6 cents per kwh which seems to be the average in many places.
assuming an S9 consumes 1200w per hour or 1.2kw meaning at least 1.72$ a day or 50$ a month, but then I would probably have to cash out monthly and pay the bill , so the first cash out would have been the end of may when
BTC price was at about 8000$ which means in the first month I would have lost 50$/8000$ = 0.00625
BTCthe second bill would have been paid by end of June of price at about 11000$ = 50$ /11000$ = 0.00454
BTCtotal bill = 0.01
BTC1- Miner cost in btc = 250$/5000$ = 0.05
BTC2-Average Income to date (2 months including electity bills at 6 cents per kwh) = 0.027 - 0.01 = 0.017
BTC3-Current Miner price ( if want to sell today) = 500$/11600$ = 0.043
BTCtotal
BTC value as of today = 3+2 = 0.043 + 0.017 = 0.06
BTC made of 0.05
BTC with a net profit of
0.01 BTC or 250$ turned to 708$
fiat wise, your 250$ would have now worth = 580$
Mining wise, your 250$ now worth = 708$
There are a lot of other factors involved which I can't really cover all, because many of them simply depend on your luck, the time you sell your earning, a few gears go bad, difficulty spikes/drops , supply and demand on mining gears.
but overall, IMO during a bear market shift, when prices start to rise, mining
BTC is in most cases more profitable than simply buying
BTC, which may lead me to think that investing in mining after the bull run has already started may be a terrible idea.