Tl;dr – you pay for Mh/s rental more or almost equal upfront to the amount of money you may or may not receive throughout the year. The only thing that you need to have to come to the same conclusion is calculator.
A few words just in case you are new to this topic (if you are an expert –please scroll down a bit). Mining is the process of obtaining cryptocurrencies by running specific software (miners) on PC. During this process you generate heat (probably making some polar bears sad), use electricity and get crypto currencies that you can convert to money. Now, you can do that yourself by buying Bitcoin miner, or you can set up your own rig using standard computer equipment like motherboards, GPU, etc. to mine Ethereum, Siacoin or one of the many others. It is quite an interesting process in case you like tech, but if you not, you are in trouble.
For those who don’t want to spend time building own rig, or simply do not have a place to put it, or high electricity price or one of my other reasons there is an alternative called “cloud mining”. Basically you rent power from someone, who has done everything for you – setting up system, cooling and so on. So you can pay money right now and get revenue throughout the year. Or could you really?
Not to mention numerous stories when “cloud mining” was a scam, literally taking money from clients and disappearing, I have used a calculator to analyze the profitability of this process.
For my example I used one of the largest cloud mining services - Genesis and Hashflare. According to their prices, you can rent 30 Mh/s (which is the equivalent of one AMD Radeon 390 GPU) for 930 or even 1050 USD for a year contract (all fees and electricity bills included). Now if you use profitability calculator from a well-known service whattomine.com you can see that 30 Mh/s roughly equals $2.65 per day. You also get some cents from dual mining DCR or SIA, but you also lose some, due to pools luck. That gives you a rough estimate of 2.65*365=967$. All that considering that things don’t go wrong, Ethereum does not go to Proof-of-State etc. Of course we understand that in the event of PoS for Ethereum, miners will be able to mine Expanse, or Ethereum Classic or one of the hundreds other crypto currencies, but imagine, how that will change the mining difficulty, thus changing profit.
As a result, we have one-time investment of 930-1050 $ which may or may not give you 967 $ throughout the year. And when you do mining yourself, you can also sell GPU on the marketplace retrieving back some of the investments, with cloud mining you obviously can’t do that. I do sincerely hope that mining pools would lower the price, but today with the ones they provide, I would advise everyone from that sort of investments.
By the way, we have created a cool mining calculator, which in our opinion has better UX/UI than traditional whattomine.com. It is called WolfCalc, it is and will always be 100% free. I honestly hope, that you like it. You can find it at calc.wolfchange.com
This article was written exclusively for Steemit.com, it was not published anywhere else. The only picture, that wasn't made by me - is the calculators one (it was taken from eBay, link is provided). I hope that calculator doesn't mid.
Thank you