To cloud mine bitcoin or not?
I know there is a lot of drama and negative feelings around mining via cloud. It seems to be a hit and miss idea. Though for me the concept of getting passive income is so enticing. You read books and all the concepts always go to passive forms of income for reaching wealth.
I decided to take some of my HW mining profits and toss it into a mining contract. My understanding is that Genesis mining is the best option but they are constantly sold out and every time they have a presale they sell out in a week or less. Recently they had a presale for March 2018 and I purchased a small plan of 4TH. Additionally I purchased a two-year ETH mining contract (53MH) and will buy a ZEC contract which I think has huge potential. ZEC is easier to mine and has a small amount of circulated coins (2,713,181) in a $926,532,405 market cap. Seems like a no brainer crypto. Its also faster and more secure that a lot of cryptos out there.
Anyway on to the cloud mining experience. So since previously I couldn’t get a mining contract with genesis I purchased a minergate BTC mining contract, actually four in total now. The first three were for about 4 TH in total and the earliest contract I purchased was in August. They are well on the way to ROI having spent 1300 USD in a few months they earned 300 USD and as BTC rises so does the mining profits. Sounds great right?
Well hold on.. Minergate has its downsides. There is hardly any info on the company itself to start with. Who they are, who is behind it.. Support is flaky at best. Its all over the map as far as customer satisfaction but if you visit their forum there are no admins helping and the only place to get help is to email support or to find a crypto nerd in the chat on their main site when you log in. Additionally, I made the mistake of buying another contract with Minergate because things seemed to be going well and the new contract I purchased the fees were almost equal to the profits with BTC at an all time high. I get in touch with support and they inform me that as of Oct 15th they changed things and that older mining contracts “overpaid” though if you calculate using other BTC calculators on the web you quickly learn that Minergate has their own calculations and their own price modeling that do. Can it still be profitable? Well if you had older contracts probably. Mine were and are. The new contracts will only be profitable if BTC stays really high or continues on a high trend.
So please learn from my mistakes. Pick your miner with care if at all. One could argue that buying and holding is better. Though I could argue that buying a large mining contract is also extremely profitable if BTC or the crypto coin you choose goes to the moon. As in the case of BTC.. I’m also in the belief though that a lot of these cats on “youtube” with stupid flashy click bait are living off of referrals.. Which is cool but should be noted.
So going forward.. BTC mining with Minergate 10.7 TH in total will update as I get a more clear picture of profitability. As it stands it looks kinda sucky
My minergate numbers so far with the new contract (post Oct 15)
6.5 TH which mines a whopping 0.00033371 BTC per day which gross nets right now about $2.60.
Strangely the older contracts I have with less hash pay much more. One for example with 2.6 TH nets almost $4 dollars a day which was the trigger for me buying a new contract. So, I look at the industry standard which is basically look at a BTC mining calculator which has current difficulty and you see a different picture. 6.5 TH gets you 0.001213 that’s a whole decimal point more.
So mining bitcoin via cloud. Yes it can be profitable but be careful who you choose. I’m now on board with Genesis I know its gross but I got to earn a living so my code is 6G7hy1 for a massive 3% discount that everyone that signs up gets to pimp out in the hope of getting some free mining power.
Anyway hope this was helpful and that others can learn a bit from my mistakes. Ultimately lifetime contracts are maybe not lifetime because as difficulty increases and the limit on coins but it’s a medium to high risk investment. Maybe not better than holding or other techniques but maybe as part of a whole crypto strategy. For example, hold, mine, speculate with a few cool ICOs. Everyone needs to figure out what works for them. Some people spend what they have and mining is forced savings in a way.. anyway rambling now.. Take care.. I’ll post about ETH cloud mining and the HW mining I do in the future.