Blog • November 19, 2025
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For years, one phrase has been floating around among the bitcoin mining hosting bros:
“Mining is basically DCA’ing into bitcoin with hardware.”
They claim that just because a miner periodically receives new bitcoin into his wallet — just like a DCA’er — he’s employing the dollar-cost averaging strategy.
It’s nonsense.
And it’s a perfect example of how parts of Bitcoin culture have been hijacked by marketers trying to sell bitcoiners stuff.
They take one of the most respected and universally loved concepts in Bitcoin — dollar-cost averaging — and twist it into a sales pitch to make mining sound more like a safe, responsible, long-term investment strategy.
This is maybe the most retarded misconception in the entire mining industry — perhaps only rivaled by last week’s debunked narrative that you can “mine a bitcoin for $65,000 instead of buying it for $125,000.”
It sounds clever, but it’s completely wrong.
In this article, I’ll explain why — and show a chart that compares DCA and lump-sum strategies for both mining and direct bitcoin purchases, so you can see the difference for yourself.
If you already know what dollar-cost averaging is, you can skip this section.
Dollar-cost averaging (DCA) is one of the most respected strategies in bitcoin investing. It’s simple: you buy a fixed amount of bitcoin on a regular schedule — for example, every week or every month — regardless of the price.
Over time, this smooths out volatility and removes emotion from the process. Instead of trying to time the market, you accumulate bitcoin steadily, averaging your entry price and minimizing regret.
It’s a disciplined way to save the hardest money ever created. That’s why so many bitcoiners swear by it — and why the term “DCA” has become almost sacred in Bitcoin culture.
Before explaining why mining isn’t DCA, we need to clarify what DCA actually is.
DCA is defined by how you buy — not how you receive.
You are DCA’ing only if you buy the asset multiple times, spreading out your entry price over time.
Receiving periodic inflows — whether from yield, rent, or mining — is not DCA.
If I invest a lump sum in a bond that pays me monthly interest, I’m not DCA’ing — I just made one investment that gives me recurring cash flow.
If I buy an apartment and collect rent every month, I’m not DCA’ing into real estate — I already bought it.
The same logic applies to mining.
Whether something is DCA depends entirely on how you acquired the exposure — lump sum or gradually — not on how you receive the returns.
Thus, if you only hit Buy once, you made a lump-sum purchase, no matter what you acquired.
When you buy a mining machine, you’re not DCA’ing into bitcoin. You’re effectively buying bitcoin up front — just in a different form.
You pay, say, $5,000 for a miner today. That machine will produce a certain amount of bitcoin over its life.
But here’s the key: When you bought the miner, you already bought the future bitcoin that it will produce.
The moment you made that purchase, you made a lump-sum bitcoin investment — you just did it indirectly, through a machine.
The price you pay for the miner reflects the market’s expectation of how much bitcoin it will produce after operating costs, essentially what’s captured by its hashprice.You can look at it as a bitcoin-denominated bond.
Furthermore, since miner prices are tightly correlated with bitcoin’s price, you’re paying close to the current market rate for that future bitcoin stream.
So no, you’re not DCA’ing — you’re just making a riskier, delayed, and more operationally complex lump-sum bitcoin purchase.
The chart below compares four strategies for an investment of $100k total from January 1st, 2020, to January 1st, 2025.
Just like with bitcoin itself, you can buy miners all at once or spread your purchases over time.
Mining is not DCA by itself — it’s simply another vehicle through which you can make either a lump-sum or DCA-style investment.
And by the way, this isn’t unique to mining — the same logic applies to any investment asset.
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What does the chart tell us:
Mining is not DCA.
It’s a lump-sum bet on the future flow of bitcoin — a complex, risk-loaded investment disguised by hosting bros as a disciplined savings strategy.
When you buy a miner, you’re not averaging into bitcoin over time — you’re committing capital today to secure a stream of future bitcoin, at a price that already reflects the current market.
That’s not dollar-cost averaging. That’s a bitcoin-denominated bond with hardware, operating risk, and uncertainty built in.
If you truly want to DCA, you can — but then you must buy miners over time, just as you would buy bitcoin over time.
Mining itself doesn’t magically make you a DCA investor.
So next time someone tells you that “mining is just DCA’ing into Bitcoin,” you can tell them the truth: It’s not. It’s a lump-sum bitcoin investment — just one that comes with more risk and work.
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