What about GPU mining ETH and others via something like nicehash? Is this a reasonably safe bet (relative to just buying the coins outright)? I'm mostly looking at it as a means of building a new workstation and have it pay for itself over the course of a year or so while I'm not using it.

Unless you are situated next to a hydro electric power station that provides very cheap electricity stay away from this. you will build a rig then as the difficulty goes up you'll watch all your profit eaten away by electricity costs.

Yeah, I was sort of concerned about what 20xx Nvidia cards could end up doing to the difficulty. I'm really only considering it because I'd also use those cards for other things.

A year? the ROI for that would be like 5 years - you over-estimate the profits currently. It was profitable back in March far more than it is now - the gold rush with mining is over.

Based on my electricity costs it looked like it should be a little over 8 cents an hour for a ~$500 GPU, but I could've had something wrong there.

Sure, but how much crypto currency are you going to get out of it from a pool? if you get 8.1 cents per hour, well that's not exactly that exciting.

I've been a miner for years, and I'd recommend you take a look at your expectation of profit, it is profitable still, but get ready to be disappointed.

If you're going to use the video card anyways, mining will easily cover the electricity cost of mining in most areas, and can be a decent way to cover part of the cost of the card.

That said, I wouldn't buy video cards specifically for mining unless you have access to very cheap (or free) electricity.

What is "cheap" though exactly? In my area, costs vary a lot, between 3.5 and 10.5 cents per KWh

It's profitable at most electricity rates:

https://whattomine.com

Is there a "reputable cryptocurrency" index fund one could buy into?

not that I'm aware of, and they would probably charge high fees.

Personally I target a 60%/30%/10% spread of ETH/BTC/MISC. I use Gemini for ETH/BTC and Kraken for the smaller coins.

My total crypto monthly spending is between 15-25% of my monthly savings budget, FWIW. The rest gets split between a traditional index fund and a regular savings account.

If the whole crypto market burns down tomorrow I'll only be out 15-25% of my total invested savings since I started putting money into crypto, and if it takes off I'll get nice returns but I'm not banking on it.

I invest in crypto because I believe in the tech, not in getting rich off of it. Me putting money into is my vote of confidence and nothing else.

https://www.iconomi.net/dashboard/#/INDEX Might be what you are looking for

Not directly to the point, but look at this:

"Hedge Funds Investing in Cryptocurrencies ‘Exploding’ – 62 in Pipeline"

https://news.bitcoin.com/hedge-funds-investing-in-cryptocurr...

I'm not sure about bcash!

Edit: agreed on the token sales, currently. Difficult to get a feel for the price.