Well they are accurate - at that point in time
If you're talking about a 12 month period then you have to also realise that the increasing difficulty happens for a reason, and that reason is usually increasing price. So the coins earnt when difficulty was low would now be worth more.
Anyways this post is very old, and I never ended up pushing forward with my trial of cloud mining
My point is if you buy the coin directly instead of buying hash, you would get more coins and your profits would get multiplied due to price increase. Instead if you get a contract, you would end up getting lesser coins than the projection due to difficulry increase. Which will result in far lesser profit than buying and selling.
except that isn't necessarily always true. it may be in some cases, but not always.
And difficulty doesn't always increase. It can also decrease.
When I did my bitcoin calculation, it worked out that I would likely hit break even point on a 12 month contract within 2-3 months.
Yes it is true every time. I am yet see proof of someone who earned more through CM(without referral bonus) than holding, in the same period of time. Difficulty decrease is such a rare occasion that you wont able to notice it in a 12 month contract. When you did your calculation, you wouldnt have considered the difficulty increase. It is the main criteria which cannot be predicted. Also you should not calculate it in dollar value instead the relative coin count/price on the day you bought the contract.
Say for example, in 2017, a 1500 dollar hashflare investment would have returned $4300 by the end. But the same investment directly in bitcoin, would have returned $19,600. This is always the case with cloud mining. Cloud mining would always give lesser profit than Buying and holding.