i started mining in 2013 and i've been able to survive by treating it as a calculated long term gamble. i think about bitcoin in terms of decades, but for mining estimates i have trouble planning past 45 days. the least interesting and least helpful information is how much bitcoin is worth today.

I still treat this space skeptically and am pessimistic about my own mining projections. There is still a loooong way to go.

between when i started and now. i saw a half dozen contentious forks, two extended famines in cryptocurrency, and a few speculative bubbles. i learned to ignore these and keep mining.

I was most encouraged by the improvements over the years: bip39 on hardware wallets, segwit soft fork, and implementation of the coinjoin protocol, and the expansion of the global hashrate.

imo the risk is still immense, and i would not have worked on bitcoin had i not had other investments in order.