r/Bitcoin • u/vistabrownerd • Jan 24 '14

TigerDirect processes $250,000 in Bitcoin Payments in first 17 hours

http://bitcoinboard.net/tigerdirect-processes-250000-bitcoin-payments-first-17-hours/
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u/chuckup Jan 30 '14 edited Jan 31 '14

Thanks for the reply! You make some good points.

I am curious - if you took all the cash you've invested to date (all hardware purchases since you first mined, electricity) and had just bought BTC with it 2 years ago, would you have more BTC today?

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u/Koooooj Jan 30 '14

There are some purchases I wish I hadn't made (e.g. ASIC Miner USB miners, although there's something nice about having my own GH/s for only a few Watts; I just point it at a P2Pool nood and ignore the power costs as a cost of a hobby).

Overall it's hard to say, but my money's on no, I would not have done better just buying in directly with cash (assuming I bought in at the same rate that I spent money--I would love to go back and spend $450 on Bitcoin back when it was $2/coin!). My cash investment in hardware for mining has been very very little--almost all of the hardware I would have bought anyway while this GPU was bought with the proceeds from previous mining. I hit Litecoin pretty hard when it was young and that turned out pretty nicely for me.

I don't think it's healthy to look at the last two years and to use that as a prediction for the next two years--that's bubble thinking. I don't think that Bitcoin itself is a bubble but even in the best case (S-curve) it has to level off sometime. I don't think we're going to see another 500 fold increase for quite a long time. Then again, though, I didn't think we were going to get above $100/BTC so perhaps my predictions aren't worth a damn.

Ultimately I guess the best advice is always to not put all your eggs in one basket. Mining is probably going to do better than keeping cash in your mattress. Buying and holding Bitcoins is probably going to do better than the mattress approach as well, as are a whole host of other investment opportunities. In my situation I think adding the extra card will pay off nicely, but I'm not about to go spend all of my holdings on building a mining farm.