Hi guys, AAA here!
If you've read some of my other posts already, you're probably somewhat familiar with the concept of cryptocurrency and potentially even tokens. You're probably looking for ways to make money off of crypto, and mining may have even crossed your mind. But with cryptocurrency already so complex, blockchain, bitcoin, ethereum, and then you have all the other alts, how are you supposed to figure out how to setup your own mining rig, choose the currency to mine, build the rig, find the right graphics cards (which are probably all sold out anyway or 5x the price on ebay) and the various other things to get your mining rig setup?
A SIMPLE SOLUTION is cloud mining! Cloud mining allows you to front the capital and essentially rent mining rigs from companies that specialize in mining. These companies have built massive mining farms in countries like Iceland that are plentiful in renewable energy and have vast amounts of space. The noise and costs are kept to a minimum and ROI is high. Rigs typically run high in electricity costs, are very loud, and hot. You need proper cooling equipment, ample space, and an area where loud noise will not disturb the local surroundings. In exchange for their mining power, you front them capital. When one person rents or buys contracts from cloud miners, this concept doesn't make sense, but when you have thousands to tens of thousands of people doing this, it changes the landscape.
CLOUD MINING SAVES YOU the time in researching how to setup a rig, pay for utilities such as electricity, setting up an area to mine where loud noises and constant heat will not bother anyone, maintenance which can include monitoring the rigs, fanning and or cooling, and honestly everything else you would not want to do. Cloud miners generally sell X year contract(s) for mining. For example, you can choose to buy a 2 year contract to mine ethereum. You will be asked how much hashpower you want which will determine the amount of ethereum you mine daily and get paid. The more ethereum you would like to receive daily, the larger the hashpower you will have to purchase. Some cloud mining companies allow you to purchase an indefinite mining contract with no year limit. If the mining contract ever becomes unprofitable to mine, those contracts get canceled (this is not refunded from what I know so the capital cost is a lot lower) while the 2 year contracts if and when they become unprofitable to mine, are moved to another currency (this is a bit safer as you are guaranteed a full 2 years of mining). The downfalls of mining are you normally only get part of the profits because cloud mining companies charge you generally for maintenance and electricity, storage, etc. Even when they say they don't, you're payouts are usually 50% less than if you were to mine it yourself.
https://www.genesis-mining.com/our-offer
I MINE WITH Genesis Mining and Hashing24. Genesis Mining is the most well known mining company and typically does 2 years contracts for crypto currencies such as Bitcoin (this is an open ended contract), Ethereum, Dash, Litecoin, Monero, ZCash and a few others. The interesting thing about mining is, although you are mining Dash or Ethereum so to say, you can choose to be paid out in Bitcoin or Litecoin and vice versa. Different coins have different difficulty mining levels, so some coins will pay out better than others, but if you prefer to hold bitcoin or ethereum, you can choose your coins to be payed out in that coin. The cool thing about Genesis as well is that once you setup an account with Genesis Mining, you can setup all your different wallet addresses in your account and whenever you get a payout in that currency, it automatically will send the coins to your respective wallets. You pretty much just sit there and collect (although I would recommend checking your payouts from time to time). Genesis will automatically send your coin payouts to your wallet, while Hashing24 (bitcoin only), requires you to manually login and send your payouts.
PAYOUT ROI for cloud mining is typically less than 1 year. This means that when you invest in a 2 year contract for mining, your ROI on that mining contract will be less than a year. The second year is pure profit. Obviously different coins and tokens will have different difficulty levels so ROI will depend on what you mine, but if you believe that the crypto space is going to continue to balloon larger like I do, the value of the coins you receive daily will also increase in value daily. So if you are a HODL-er like I am, just hold for a while and then cash out. Below is a payout calculator if you would like to calculate how long it would take for you to hit breakeven.
Bitcoin mining calculator
THE CLOUD MINING SPACE IS A SCARY ONE and still has some of the more senior community members skeptical or against it. This is because of how fast this industry is growing and with that growth comes people looking to make quick money by scamming. Many scam sites have come and gone in the past for cloud mining. See the article below. Usually the scam sites are around for a handful of months at best which is one of my qualifiers when I choose a cloud mining company to invest in. The crypto space is also about regaining control which is why we're all so adamant with taking our coins off exchanges, holding in our own software wallets, hardware wallets or paper wallets. Cloud mining is basically handing over control to another entity which is another reason why many people are against it. I'm an advocate of passive income, and if I can find a somewhat trustworthy method of passive daily income, I'd be okay with relinquishing some control for that opportunity/benefit. I personally have not been scammed yet in this industry by cloud mining, or double your bitcoin companies, but who knows how intelligent these scams will get in the future. There are companies mimicking ICO websites, Twitter accounts, changing l's to i's and telling people to copy and paste their link which will take them to a fake site, etc. so be very careful and always do your own research!
The reason why I like Genesis and trust it is because of how long it's been around. It's been around for almost 4 years now and many people have done videos on youtube of receiving consistent payouts from Genesis for over 1 year+. Genesis also has provided walkthroughs of their mining facility for their top Youtube affiliates. As a precaution, I also mine with Hashing24 which is backed by Bitfury, another reputable industry player in the crypto space as it's always best to diversify.
https://themerkle.com/top-6-bitcoin-cloud-mining-scams/
If you'd like to get started in cloud mining or support me, you can use my referral link below. Let me know when you make an upgrade and i'll return the favor so you can receive free hashpower!
Genesis Mining (Use code below for 3% discount on all purchases)
wqsG4u
Hashing 24 (referral link)
https://hashing24.com/?rid=53616c7465645f5fb41a467f18f37d0383e8bed632edb43e
TL;DR
Pro's of cloud mining - daily crypto payouts with no work. Literally pay a one time fee and receive daily payouts for 2 years. ROI in less than 1 year on a 2 year contract.
Con's of cloud mining - payouts are half of what you would normally get than if you mined yourself. A lot of scams in crypto space and who knows if Genesis or Hashing24 are scams or not (probably not at this point but still scary). You don't really own the miners and most of the time you are renting them.
Great article!!! Have you ever tried hashflare? I've been mining on it for a couple months now and it's almost as good as GENESIS and much cheaper than hashing24
Thanks, I've been getting my friends into crypto currency and I have to go through all the basics with them. I thought I'd write the articles and share with the community here as well as have a resource for them to use as well.
I've definitely heard of hashflare and from what I know, it's reputable as well. There's only 3 that I trust as of now and Hashflare, Genesis, and Hashing24 are it. But if you're balls deep in this crypto space, you probably have a sh1t ton of accounts and passwords. I really did not want to create another account and password that I had to remember and that's the ONLY reason why i'm not on hashflare haha.
I made an analysis on profitability of cloud mining and it really isn't. Thats because the mining difficultt increases fast and using calculator like cryptocompare gives very misleading figures as it doesn't take into account the diffuculty increases over time. Here's my analysis: https://steemit.com/blockchain/@danzu51/genesis-mining-dash-mining-profitability-analysis