Dealing with Price Stress

Hey everyone, As a miner, I'm curious how you handle the stress from price fluctuations. Personally, I’ve always lifted weights, worked out regularly, and stuck to a keto diet. Been playing football for about eight years, too. I first learned about bitcoin when I started playing, and it's turned into a fun hobby for me. I've gotten used to studying and hitting the gym to manage my stress. So now that I'm getting into mining, I want to know what you guys do when prices change. Oh, and I snagged an N.W.C.C eighth-grade title and got a state championship ring. Fingers crossed that mining works out for me.

First, know you will never "get rich" using household/hobby mining hardware. What you will do is acquire a hobby that has the potential to motivate you to learn a *LOT* of mathematics, much about the how the internet works, software development, and most of all patience (possibly the most important skill for any investor). At some point you'll even learn a bit of electronics, at the very least the relationship between volts, amps, and watts (and what the latter cost). Meanwhile, think of investing as developing strength (or losing weight). You don't test everyday; you develop a plan and stick to it. Then at intervals you test (your plan) and make any changes you need. Good luck!

Correct. Mining is a chicken-and-egg problem. You need money to make money. If you want to become rich off of nothing, I suggest becoming a software developer and helping mining farms optimize their operations. You could profit off the 'suckers' entering the market. Of course, the failure rate is 80-90% for software companies, so be prepared to spend up to 10 years throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks. When one does succeed, the payoff will more than compensate for the 10 or so failures.

Hobbyist mining seems appealing to me. What kind of math is bitcoin?

Software companies for bitcoin? What are they?

BraiinsOS, various mining pools, a stratum proxy optimizer or two, GPU management platforms (Minerstat/SMOS/HiveOS), energy price curtailment, blah blah... The key is to develop a killer product nobody ever thought they needed.

The key to stress free operation is minimizing your operating cost. A lot of the operating cost is power, so getting cheap power is critical.  If you are a low cost producer of bitcoin due to cheap power and efficient mine management, you are not all that affected by price fluctuations. Difficulty adjusts with price and when price goes down, its usually the high cost producers of bitcoin that are forced to stop mining.

Bitcoin (and all cryptocurrency) is based in cryptography. There are tons of articles available online that explain things fairly simply, e.g. this one on Investopedia: https://www.investopedia.com/tech/explaining-crypto-cryptocurrency/ Obviously you don't have to understand it to mine successfully, but it is something more or less useful to know and gaining some mastery of the field could lead to opportunities in the software side of the industry.