> As soon as it's more profitable to just buy the bitcoin, the miners will turn off the machines. There's no point spending $1.01 to mine $1 of Bitcoin when you can just buy it at market rates.

It's not really that simple because mining Bitcoin is a lottery, and the amount of coins a block is worth is not a constant value due to being able to collect a variable amount transaction fees (Which are becoming much higher then they used too).

You can estimate approximately how much it will cost you per Bitcoin, and you can obviously view historical data on how much the mining has cost you, but there's no way to know going in that it's going to cost you $1.01 to mine $1 of Bitcoin, there's too many variables in play.

Disagree completely. It's easy to calculate your EV. If the EV is negative, you don't take the bet. Super simple stuff.

Furthermore if the EV is zero, you don't take the bet either because lowering your variance is a good thing.