With current energy pricing, we just feel broke.
For myself, it's just annoying. I'd rather spend the money on something else, but it's not like I'm going bankrupt. I do know some who are in a real fix however, because they're using natural gas for home heating.
(This isn't a rant or anything, or targeted at you in particular. Just a comment on the world currently)
My parents make less than $35,000/year combined. They are in their 60s. They took up mining roughly 2 years ago to earn some extra cash.
Yeah spending $1000 on a mid-range gpu just seems like to much. Rather just invest that.
We have mixed heating of natural gas and heat pump that takes heat out of the concrete walls (something called mass absorber, concrete contains a ton of heat especially when the sun shines on it) an of course this happens on the outer layer before the insulation. Anyway having good insulation helps keeping costs manageable also because you can get away with lower temps inside.
Current ETH prices are over $3,100. ETH has dipped under $2,500 3 times in the past year. If you bought the dip and sold high every time (I did 2 out of 3 of those times) you would have nearly doubled your investment. If you were holding 2 years ago, selling today would have landed you a cool 780% return.
Sure, if you mine there are electrical costs involved, however, in many areas of the world, including several parts of the US, electricity is dirt cheap.
Conventional investments cannot touch the returns of what crypto has done in the past.
Don't get me wrong, I want crypto to die, though not for "I want a gaming GPU" type of reason, but rather, "humans are killing the planet". That being said, I still mine, others still drive gasoline powered vehicles, the world as a whole still runs on dirty and/or nonrenewable energy sources.
You'de be surprised how many miners, even experienced ones, are like, "YOLO! Mining Forever! Keep acquiring GPUs!".
Though, I think some of the more cautious miners, are holding off on buying new cards, waiting for prices to fall.
Why would they be? For me, if I bought a 6900XT tomorrow, and the market crashed right after, worst case scenario is I'm out 1 GPU. My other GPUs have made dump trucks full of money, so even if I bought 10 new GPUs I technically wouldn't "be out" anything, but rather, I'd have a couple thousand less in profit. Realistically, mining is going to be profitable for several more months, if not throughout 2022. My electricity cost is $0.08 per kw/h btw, even cheaper than that thanks to being offsetted by solar, and I'm not a "pro" miner. Most of my crypto was purchased.