This post will be pretty nerdy and confusing, so not for everyone. Ill try to keep it as clear as possible. I posted in early January 2021, when the mining rate was 8000 sats, which equated to $2.77 USD and the same USD value of Ethereum. Now the mining rate is 8199 sats which equates to $3.82. The 199 sats increase is only equal to 0.10cents so most of this increase has come from the increase in the price of Bitcoin. Therefore, in this time the mining rate has gotten more expensive in USD terms. So does this mean its not worth mining any more? It's not quite that simple.
It's pretty obvious that during the time period mentioned above, the BTC dividend payouts have been decreasing as the BTC profit pool has decreased. This is why I wrote the post What's happening with the dividends? So many things are changing at once that you can get the wrong picture if you only look at one item. Yes the BTC dividends have decreased, but the ETH and now BNB profit pools are now providing non-btc dividends. The price of these tokens have also gone up in USD terms recently.
So you can say the price to mine tokens has gone up, but the tokens have also gone up in USD terms. You still will have had an advantage of a lower mining price from starting earlier, but anyone starting later will have the advantage of increased USD dividend value that would offset the mining price increase to a point. If the price continues to go up then they benefit even more.
The problem is there is a lot of lag in the cycles. The way I see the cycle is as follows:
Lower token price => Cheaper mining => Increase in the profit pool => More dividends => Higher token price => Less mining => Decrease in the profit pool => Decreased dividends
The cycle of token price directly influences the profit pool and in turn the dividend payouts, but with great lag. We cant time the cycles so a certain amount of faith is required that the token price will decrease/increase at some point and therefore replenish profit pools, or allow the withdrawing of profits to USD. Betfury has also made an attempt at smoothing this effect by adding ETH and BNB which will not eliminate these cycles but hopefully smoothen them out by allowing other mining options or to encourage new players into the system.
I suppose my conclusion is that since we cant time the cycles, mine anytime provided you are long term bullish on token appreciation and Betfury as a company. If Bitcoin increases rapidly in price, don't deposit more USD to tokens, just take a break from mining if you run out until it corrects. You can cash out dividends into USD while price is high. If price corrects lower, resume buying tokens and mining. Personally I don't want to convert tokens to USD. I also bought Bitcoin a while ago in a lump sum, therefore trying to time this cycle is not as important to me.