I've had this passing fancy over the years for cloud mining over at Eobot since around 2013. I actually joined in their first year and have treated my involvement there as more of a hobby that builds some coin in ones that I wouldn't have the chance to mine otherwise, at not with the old SHA-256 ASICS I still have.
One cool thing is that I could point the last Antminer S-7's I have there for a while and build some GHS or coin quickly. It hasn't been a bad play lately as mining direct for Bitcoin has gotten worse than watching the grass grow.
In the past couple of weeks I've been moving stray coin in out of there and working toward getting some external STEEM flowing into my wallet here for powering back up. I cashed out a bunch of Z-Cash I accumulated into my local wallet and bought a couple Eth-Hash contracts at Genesis Mining, which also pays out in STEEM. The plan here was to have as many incoming streams as possible for increasing Steam power.
This morning I got a blunt email from the proprietor of Eobot informing us all that with the current Chinese crackdown on Bitcoin and it's related activities, the possibility exists that they may have to terminate cloud mining contracts early unless whoever holds their mining equipment will let them ship it out of country. Holding my breath is probably a bad idea i would imagine.
The first thing I have to say is that I was always under the impression that Mr. Eobot owned his own mining equipment. I'm not sure what the strategic advantage to housing mining equipment in China does for a cloud ming operation, but obviously were now seeing the downside to this strategy.
I will give Eobot credit for staying in the cloud mining game for as long as they have. I've seen more than a few that have simply ran with the money, but they've been around for a while and do pay almost immediately in my experience.
I suppose the reason for this rant is to wonder how many more "we regret to inform you emails" we all might start seeing as the price of Bitcoin continues to fall because of China. How many cloud mining operations, exchanges and other miscellaneous crypto sites are going high tail it because the fast profits have slowed due to the Chinese governments' actions?
I've invested into viabtc cloud mining, haven't gotten any such news from there yet. As far as I've understood, only bitcoin exchanges on mainland China is affected, mining operations should be unaffected. However, I suppose that once it's impossible to sell bitcoins directly for yuans, it will be more difficult for Chinese mining operations to cover their electricity bills.
Yes, No matter how small it is, an extra step will weed out a lot of the casual investors. Which is good and bad for Bitcoin, good because more experienced and passionate people will trade Bitcoin, but bad because it will narrow down the amount of people willing to trade Bitcoin.
I've got a small amount of eobot mining. It must just be cheaper to host it in China as a business will go for maximum profit. It's hard to guess where their government will go next with this as they try to control the finance world
I think China is realizing what what many have over the past few years - you can't monopolize crypto. The blockchain is coded to prevent it. The harder you mine, the higher the difficulty and the less you make. Sure, you can buy the hell out of Bitcoin and drive the price up, but the only thing that gets you is having to do it again, and again and again.
That's right, a few of them are based out there for the cheap power! Or they were...
I suppose power is cheaper when you don't care what you're doing to the environment while creating it.
Yeah that is exactly the case