Jefferies analyst Jonathan Petersen answered the question in his Oct. 18 research report. "It's a fair question, but upon exploration of the topic, we have observed that mining generally results in higher returns on multi-year periods of time," Petersen wrote. His analysis showed that if someone bought a more recent mining computer, an S19 Pro, at the end of the first quarter of 2020, when the market spot price for the machine was $2,410, a mine-and-hold strategy would return 1,083% vs buying and holding bitcoin, which would return 764%.