Hindsight is always 20/20. I sold over 400 BTC for roughly $6.00 each and was happy just to have proceeds to pay for a couple 7970's lol.
Some of you may recall about a year ago me building all those milk crate miners. I sunk a good 15 to 20K into my gear and still pay the $800+ hydro bills each month. I also sold half of my Bitcoin to buy the mining gear and to buy up a good amount of Ether (roughly 50/50). I could have just bought a ton of Ether instead of mining gear but I wanted to hedge my bets in case the things went south. I recall friends and family asking me why the hell am I building all these miner's thinking I was trying to make up for my BTC regrets or something lol.
Explaining to my wife that paying the Hydro bill each month is the same as investing took a while for her to sink in. Mining ~6 Ether a day after The Daobacle was nice and the difficulty actually dropped for a while when the coin tanked in price. ZCASH was also a nice distraction.
With all the delays in PoS the mining gear has worked out pretty well all things considered. My 480's are still going strong and I'll continue mining until the Ice Age before flooding my local Kijiji with my loot. I'm still holding Ether as long as possible but put a down payment on a Tesla Model 3 (the new car, not the overpriced Nvidia card) and hope to pay a good chunk of it with the sale of my mining gear (and a few BTC if necessary). My existing car is an old rust bucket but it only needs to last another year or whenever the Model 3's finally arrive.
Anyway I want to thank Metalliax for starting this thread. If it wasn't for his post I wouldn't have started building rigs and buying up Ether well over a year ago. Also thanks to everyone else who was supportive during the rougher months. This thread is mostly filled with positive comments (a rarity for these forums) and some good knowledge.
To all who started late, don't fret. The BlockChain space will take over many existing industries. We're really at mid to late 90's compared to where the Internet was. Still plenty of opportunities out there. Blockchain and likely Ethereum (or possibly something better) will likely make up the new Internet. This is bigger than we can envision right now. No Kool-aid necessary
Fun times now, funner times ahead!