Jumping head first !

Do not only compare the mining contracts and current payback period : that is not as simple as that.

That is what i did, and that is what you should NOT do ;)

If you go on https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/#/contracts you will see that the payback period ( as off Dec 19 December 2017 ) is 69 days.

Capture d’écran 2017-12-19 à 09.21.01.png

How nice, i will get my money back in 69 days, and next for 296 days, i will make profits !

Hummm… that is not as simple. Still hashflare remains the most profitable, but the above list provided by the comparator is a point in time snapshot of the ROI, not taking into account the every 2 weeks mining difficulty change.

The picture will be quite different if you considerer the mining difficulty will change over the next 12 months at the same rate it has been changing the last months : The higher the difficulty is, the less you will mine BTCs with the same Hashpower HT/s.

The relevant question is : If i spend today X BTCs, will i get X BTCs or more mined in one year from now ?

Let say you want to spend 10000$ ( 0.52 BTC with Dec 19 2017 BTC/USD price). With that money in hashflare cloud mining you can buy 67 TH/s

Here is a simple way to answer that question :

First remove the maintenance fees (which about about 17%) from your current hashing power : 67*0.83 = 55.61 TH/s
Try to evaluate the difficulty change per month. I choose 700G/month because that is the rough rounded up value of what is expected for December : https://btc.com/stats/diff : 2017–12–06 17:23:21: 1,590,896,927,258 (+18.11 %), 2017–12–18 14:55: 201,873,105,475,221 (+ 17.74 %). Next Difficulty Estimated for 2017–12–30: 2,223,174,606,26 (+18.69%). Alternatively you can let the The mycryptobuddy calculator choose for you (see below).
Go on http://www.mycryptobuddy.com/BitcoinMiningCalculator which is one of the best mining profit calculator as it tries to evaluate the mining difficulty based on the previous months changes or you can provide the difficulty change by yourself ( the 700G i calculated before )

Capture d’écran 2017-12-19 à 09.48.00.png

So yes, you can expect to reach the Break-Even in 3 months even with a large difficulty change, but do not expect to triple or quadruple your initial investment !

Still on http://www.mycryptobuddy.com/BitcoinMiningCalculator/, the chart on the left will show you how much coins you will make with your 1 year mining contract payed 0.52 BTC

Select View -> Coins generated an Time Frame : 12 months

Capture d’écran 2017-12-19 à 10.11.47.png

Or reported in the table below, that show that your BTC coins generated will go down drastically over the months

Capture d’écran 2017-12-19 à 10.22.41.png

Conclusion : Do not expect to make a bit more than double your investment by buying a 12 months mining contract at hashflare. When it comes to cloud mining still hashflare is the most profitable ans in my own case i consider it is a fair deal. Getting more than twice BTCs in one year that i have now and not dealing with trading stuff, that is what i want.