What’s up steemit, I was introduced to steem by @full-measure. To keep my mediocre writing skills from atrophying further I’ll be writing a series of posts about cryptomining, entitled the “Ten Mining Commandments,” obviously after the classic Biggie song.

My dream is that people will respond to the dumb mining questions posted (in other forums) with links to these posts. The cryptomining community is so generous with the resources handed out for free, such as the countless free mining tools (claymore fees notwithstanding) and the effort spent hand holding people who have never touched a computer before. This is my humble contribution to the latter.

Without further ado...

1. When to mine and when to buy

If buying crypto is like buying common stock, the closest analogy to mining crypto is buying preferred stock. Preferred shares typically pay a large dividend and are senior to common equity holders in the event of liquidation. As a result, preferred stock has less downside and upside risk compared to common stock; most of their returns come from the dividend payments.

EBAY (common) vs. EBAYL (pref.)

In the investing world, preferred shares are typically used to hedge, i.e., not many successful investors open positions consisting of 100% preferred shares. The same should apply to crypto, if you have no clue what you're doing and you want to get into crypto, doing it only by investing in mining rigs is likely suboptimal.