In this article I want to share with the community my experience of using a cloud mining service. This is a question that many new users to the Cryptocurrency space are unsure about, which is why I think my story will be useful to many of you out there.
So firstly, what is a cloud mining service? A cloud mining service is where you pay money, or sometimes Cryptocurrency assets, to a company who will mine coins on your behalf. The advantage of this is that you do not need to have your own expensive system running at home 24 hours a day, using up your own electricity and causing the associated noise. This is one of a few ways that you can obtain your own Cryptocurrency, alongside buying it, earning it, or mining it yourself at home with your own equipment.
Below I am going to outline what I paid for, when I paid for it, and my returns over the course of the contract. I will then look at some other options I could have pursued at the time to see how a different investment at the time would have worked out in comparison. In this article I will not be promoting or slating a company, just sharing my story.
So in October 2016 I purchased a mining contract from a company called Genesis Mining, I purchased the contract on a pre-sale special offer, which gave me 13 months of mining for the price of 12, and the cost was $60 US dollars. The contract was to mine ZCash, a new anonymous Cryptocurrency. This was a special offer because at the time of buying the contract, ZCash had not yet been released. The contract was for 11 H/s over the course of the contract.
Over the course of the contract, in total I received 0.1857855 ZCash which at the time of calculating the numbers for this article (11th Jan 2018), was worth $124 US dollars. So at this moment in time, I had basically doubled my money! Compared to traditional financial instruments, this would be a Win Win situation…
However…
With hindsight, I looked at what else I could have done with ZCash with my $60 US dollars around the time of purchasing the contract.I looked at what I would have obtained if I instead had purchased ZCash from an exchange shortly after it had been released. ZCash was listed at between 35-50 US dollars on exchanges for a few months after I had purchased the contract, which means with my 60 dollars, I could have purchased and obtained between 1.2-1.8 ZCash for the same amount of money, or in other words, at least 6 times more than using the cloud mining service!
This is not to say that everybody will have the same experience with using a cloud mining service, others may have made more, or made less. This is just one example out of millions out there. Hindsight can be tough sometimes, but there is always a lesson to be learned. With my story, I learned a valuable lesson whilst making money. My decision would have been different knowing what I know now, and I hope that this may have helped you make your own informed decisions in the future.
Thank you for reading, and I wish you the best of luck.
Twoperscent