#12 Buying Bitcoin Is for Holders. Mining It Is for Builders

Why I Stopped Buying Bitcoin (and Started Mining It Instead)

For a long time, I thought Sobtree’s goal was simply to accumulate as much Bitcoin as possible. Buy, hold, and wait. But that’s not an option for us. In our jurisdiction, we can’t just sit on Bitcoin as a passive asset in the company’s balance sheet. We can buy it, yes, and we can use it but we can’t simply hold it forever without doing anything with it.

So we had to adapt. If we couldn’t just hold Bitcoin, we needed to make it productive. That’s how we ended up using BTC not just as a reserve, but as collateral the base layer of a system that constantly generates more Bitcoin.

The idea is simple:

Instead of just buying BTC and keeping it idle, we buy BTC, collateralize it, and use that liquidity to mine more BTC. The system feeds itself.

Mining allows us to receive Bitcoin constantly, at all possible prices, with a built-in discount rate that the market cannot give you. While others wait for the “right time to buy,” we simply keep mining.

Of course, there are rough moments. When the BTC price drops, electricity gets more expensive, or a halving cuts rewards in half, margins can vanish. There are months when, on paper, we lose money. But that doesn’t mean the strategy fails. Because even then, we’re still receiving Bitcoin.

And that constant flow is what keeps the Sobtree engine alive.

Every sat we mine can immediately become productive again. We can use it as collateral on regulated platforms, obtain liquidity without selling, and reinvest that liquidity into more hardware or energy to keep mining. It’s a self-reinforcing loop.

Here’s what that looks like in numbers.

Let’s say I invest $20,000 in mining equipment. Under current network difficulty and energy prices, that operation can generate roughly a 30–40% annual margin in BTC terms.

That means, after electricity and maintenance, you can produce between 0.12 and 0.14 BTC per year, worth around $7,500–9,000 at a $63,000 BTC price.

If the BTC price drops to $40,000, your short-term profitability may shrink, maybe you only break even. But that BTC is still flowing into your wallet.

And if you collateralize what you mine, you can borrow up to 30–40% of its value again, maybe $3,000 and use it to pay future electricity costs or even expand the setup.

That’s the real power of this model: you’re never static.

Even when the market turns against you, you’re accumulating BTC and using it to create more productive capacity.

Now compare that to traditional DCA.

If you DCAed $100 a week into BTC over the past year, you’d have invested $5,200.

At an average buy price of $63,000, that’s 0.0825 BTC.

Today, that’s worth $9,621, an 85% gain.

And if Bitcoin reaches $1M, that stack will be worth $82,500.

Consistency beats timing.

But here’s what I’ve learned: productive consistency beats passive consistency.

When you mine, you’re not just investing regularly, you’re building infrastructure that converts energy and collateral into constant Bitcoin flow.

That’s why for Sobtree, mining isn’t a technical bet. It’s a structural response to a legal constraint and, at the same time, an incredible opportunity.

It allows us to:

• Accumulate BTC without “just buying it”

• Turn that BTC into productive collateral

• Build a self-sustaining Bitcoin treasury system

In practice, what we’ve built is a Bitcoin-first Treasury architecture that works like a living organism: Bitcoin as base layer, collateral as bloodstream, energy as metabolism, and cashflow as oxygen.

And once you start seeing it that way, holding Bitcoin passively feels almost like wasting potential. Because every sat you hold could be powering the next block that pays you back in Bitcoin.