Is mining Bitcoin totally unprofitable for the average person?

So, check this out. The Bitmain Antminer KS5 Pro is the latest mining rig and it cranks out a whopping 21TH of hashrate. You can snag one for around 30k and have it delivered this month, or you could wait until August and grab it for a much cheaper 11k. With that 21TH, you’re looking at a meager $1 a day. If you do the math, it would take you 27 years to break even on that investment (which isn't even considering how the difficulty and price will shift over time, but let's keep it simple). Now, imagine you go all in and buy 20 of these rigs. That's gonna cost you 220k, giving you a total hashrate of 420 THs. To get enough to buy another miner, you'll have to wait about 500 days to make 11k. Oh, and I haven’t even factored in any electricity costs, just to show how ridiculous this situation really is. Seriously though, is there any way buying a Bitcoin miner right now is more profitable than just buying Bitcoin outright?

I think you made 2 mistake here. 1. https://www.asicminervalue.com/miners/bitmain/antminer-ks5-pro-21th says it's KHeavyHash ASIC, not SHA-256 ASIC. In addition, the website claims you can get about $92/day (excluding electricity). 2. Using this calculator (https://minerstat.com/coin/BTC) while excluding electricity, 21 TH/s (for SHA-256) produce about $1/day.

Yeah, you're talking about two completely different things, you can't take anything other than a sha256 ASIC to make plans on BTC mining...

Use this resource to check the performance of asics. https://www.asicminervalue.com/ Кaspa is an altcoin, the price of which can go down at any moment and these expensive asics will turn into useless junk.

It more profitable to just buy bitcoin whenever the prices go down instead of buying ASICs to mine bitcoin. As you have correctly pointed out, the chance of getting the money back of what you put in to get the farm set up and the breaking even point are going to be far off. Till then you would have to sustain the costs and hope that additional costs dont come up. If you observe the mining channels on youtube, they promote a certain altcoin for sometime and then move to another one. This is in sync with the coins that are having the best profit for that period. ASICs built for that algorithm might be a complete waste for you in case the price drops and you have just started mining it.

No, mining is different from buying BTC and profitability depends on their electricity rate if you don't have a cheap power rate and don't have technical skills then stop planning on mining because it won't be worth mining in the long term. If you just buy BTC and hold at the current price it doesn't generate a profit what if the price keeps declinin it stays at the current price for almost a year or 2?

Exactly, most people are not having it first hand unless they learn about it. It makes much more sense to buy bitcoin which only takes a few clicks and a lot of fiat money from the buyer's side while mining is a chore on its own. Not to mention that with warmer countries, heating is an issue and electricity is not cheap. Buying BTC does not necessarily mean just sitting on it. Some people will actively trade. Some will sell at the long term. All this depends on the buying price. But the amount of attention that it needs is much less than having to run a farm of miners.

But still, holding bitcoin is much more efficient and easier than mining because if you decide to mine bitcoin, you will need to set up and buy equipment for your mining rig, and you will wait for you to become profitable in mining while you are having expenses in electricity and wifi connection, so together, the expenses of mining are quite a lot and not applicable for small investors.  But with bitcoin holding, anyone could buy bitcoin and hold it until it becomes profitable, but again, it is not that simple. In order to earn through holding, an investor should know when to enter the market or buy bitcoin so that it doesn't catch up in the bitcoin price declining, and if done correctly, you will be profitable and successful in holding bitcoin. It's not that I'm against bitcoin mining; it's just that mining is too hassle and cannot be afforded by small investors, while bitcoin holding is more efficient and practical than mining.

I think from Genesis it was more expensive to buy a miner and mine bitcoin compared to simply buy bitcoin. Even when you could cpu mine bitcoin, you still need to buy the pc, and even assuming the hardware was free, the electricity was higher than the price, which was $0 for a couple of years or so. I think the benefits of mining are simply that someone will do it, so might as well be you. But you have to be able to do this for the long term, otherwise you won't be able to survive and pay the bills today. Also, you can see this as a lottery ticket as well, for solo mining. Much cheaper than paying multiple lotto tickets.

the op is talking about the wrong miner. a ks5 has nothing to do with mining btc the t21 burns 84 kwatts a day. if you pay 10 cents it costs $8.40 it earns $11.40 a $3 a day profit for 10 cent power cost. but if you pay 15 cents it costs $12.60 that is a $1.20 loss so 10 cent power = $3.00 profit 15 cent power = $1.20 loss

I agree there's no problem in holding BTC the only problem is newbies or first-timers when it comes to holding BTC the first problem they will need to deal with is emotion fighting against this is not instant they fear more than those people who already know about BTC once they are consumed by fear it would end up selling their holdings. Like I said it's not profitable to just holding them you can't multiply the amount of BTC unless like TheUltraElite said you can trade it but without knowledge about trading that's also risky when you enter into trade with a lack of trading skills that's a totally a gamble. Unlike in mining, you earn BTC but it would be profitable if you really have pretty cheap or almost free Electricity or if you can sustain and hold mined coins and survive for the next blockhalving then you can sell your coins at a high price because we know every 4 years BTC reach new ATH.

Yes and No, in general terms it`s very unlikely to be profitable unless you get free electricity, But, if you`re commited to using electricity for heating, then using a miner to do that same heating task could be considered profitable because you get discounted electricity prices effectively. At least that`s the way I look at it for my mining, besides it`s hard to beat some Bitcoin exhaust on a cold winter morning

I know someone running a private company in a place I will not disclose, but let's just say it has ideal environment to run a mining operation. They also managed to get a good deal on electricity. The mining game is simple and very complex at the same time. Calculate the costs of the machines, electricity, and real estate needed to host said machines. Calculate the decay of the machines (for how long they can remain profitable vs newer models before you need to start replacing them, or adding more power). And now there's a new tangent: being able to serve your power to AI related companies that need this power, so you never waste energy. There's many dynamics at play, which is why most retail attempts will not be able to compete with the pros.