Mine or buy? The honest comparison

You can buy a coin on an exchange in minutes, or you can buy hardware and mine it. Mining converts electricity into coins at a rate set by your share of the network; buying converts cash at the market price. Neither is automatically cheaper — the answer depends on your electricity rate, hardware efficiency, and what the market does.

The two paths carry different risks. Buying concentrates everything in price risk: you own the coins immediately, but you paid the full market price. Mining spreads the bet into operating risk: hardware can arrive broken or degrade, difficulty rises, tariffs change, and you must run and monitor the rig — but you keep producing coins every day at your cost floor.

Suppose you have $2,000 and a coin trades at $1.00. Buying gets you 2,000 coins today. A $2,000 GPU rig that nets $2.50/day after electricity would need 800 days of uninterrupted mining to produce the same 2,000 coins — and that assumes difficulty, price, and uptime stay flat, which they never do.

• Your electricity is genuinely cheap (under ~$0.08/kWh) or included in rent — carefully.
• You value accumulating slowly without KYC exchanges or spread fees.
• You can reuse the heat (a 3 kW rig is a 3 kW space heater — see the Energy track).
• You want to support small proof-of-work networks directly — hashrate IS the product on pow.family coins.

For pure price exposure, buying usually wins on simplicity. For cheap power, self-custody accumulation, or contributing to small chains, mining wins. Run your own numbers in the Tools section — never trust a seller's payback chart.

Every project page shows the coin's live price, network hashrate, and emission context — the three inputs of the mine-vs-buy math. The profitability calculator under Tools turns them into your own daily-net estimate.