@ArcherV said in Mining or buying?:
Hello,
My name is Archer and I'm from Germany.
A few days ago, I became aware of Burstcoin.
At the moment I mine with an old - unused - computer and a few old drives with a total capacity of round about 3 TB.
I would like to invest more in Burstcoin. Now the question arises: expand mining or buy Burstcoins? In any case, I would hold the coins.
125TB (25x Seagate Expansion Desktop (2015) + Rescue 5TB, USB 3.0 Micro-B (STEB5000201), 116 €, ~ 23.20 € per TB) would cost ~2900 €. According to the Burstcoin Calaculator I will get 41.017 burst a month with 125TB.
On the other hand I would get 164.557,51 bursts for the 2.900€...
What would be smarter?
Thanks!
Archer
as difficulty is increasing every day, return on investment is decreasing every day as a result, at least when that investment is in hardware... the "profit calculators" don't do a very good job as factoring this in, especially since they simply don't know how many more folks will join and continue to lower the ROI on every terabyte you have... so its a complete risk and gamble that the 6 months today to break even, might turn into 12 months or 24 months in the next few months...
so you're not only fighting the ROI on the equipment to create the burst, but you also have to worry about how much will the value of a burst be in the next 6 months or a year or whenever that break even point is reached... you're fighting two fights when you buy hardware in hopes you mine the burst that you hope will have a constant value based on todays value... and we simply don't know future worth... if burst goes up you win, but likely even MORE folks will come and increase difficulty that much more, making your ROI on the equipment worse...
but lets say you simply buy the burtscoin today, your only worry is what value will it have 6 months from now, not what your ROI will be to justify the expense of the hardware, so there is a LOT to say about simply purchasing it outright and not taking a risk on the hardware side of it, as thats likely a lower gain every day... but both scenarios require burst value to increase ultimately right, but only one has the downside of more miners lowering the ROI on a hardware purchase...
so for now the better risk I would say is simply buy and hold burst... not hardware... you likely have more liquidity of the burst alone, than burst and hardware, I mean, if burst crashes, who is going to be there to buy all those hard drives from you if you decide to exit the marketplace completely? do you have something you can do with all that hard drive space, or will it sit idle and empty for a long time before you can make use of it, and how much will you be able to sell it for if the marketplace is flooded with others offloading their used hardware because they too stopped mining?
I think the most logical and best option if you're going to spend the money... buy the burstcoin direct, and make sure you have a way to liquidate it from some exchange into your local currency, that way if it drops 5% or 10% or 20% in value, whatever threshold you set you can exit and have some actual currency... meanwhile you use your existing hardware and free space, to create plots, that will slowly add a few burst here and there to your purchased amount, so you can enter with less risk, and still increase overall amount of coins, without additional cost aside from electricity and depreciation on your current hardware... I think logically this is what burst was always intended for, using existing hardware, rather than the risk of purchasing exclusive hardware and rolling the dice on ROI...
so there you go... a complete non-answer with an answer... but we simply don't know how it will pan out over time... if difficulty keeps rising at the dramatic pace it has the past month, hardware is going to be the losing bet, and if burst rises and mitigates ROI you'll still come out ahead without having purchase a single extra hard drive to do it, but you won't have any new burst coins after the ROI is reached, but you'll have far more liquidity in case you decide to exit and stop mining altogether... the choice is yours... its a pickle, but I think using existing hardware and purchasing burst is the best if you're going to spend money, OR invest in something else entirely while using existing hardware to make burst, a nice NASDAQ index fund is always my favorite bet over time...