Image from coindesk.com

Hey John! I saw a cloud mining site and I was wondering, should I put a bit of money in it and jump into the cryptocurrency bandwagon?

A colleague of mine asked this question earlier and it came as no surprise that a lot of so-called investment offers have been popping out here and there. A lot of them promise quick returns on investments for a minimal fee. They often attract you with get-rich-quick schemes that gets you onboarded with cryptocurrency fast.Yes, there is at least one legitimate cloud mining site that I know of. Genesis Mining has been around since 2014 and has proven its legitimacy by being in the market for quite some time. However, a lot of other cloud mining providers are often ponzi schemes where investors basically earn money by recruiting new members and milking off profits from them — something very similar with multi-level marketing if you will.

I want to start mining. How?

Short answer is that there is no simple and cheap way to do so. You’d have to invest in really expensive application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) or build a GPU-based mining rig yourself. There are a lot of tutorials in YouTube and over Google that you can look up for you to build your very own rig. Just as a heads up though, here are a couple of problems to keep in mind if you want to take on the mining path:

1. It requires some technical knowledge on building and configuring PCs.

If you want to build a GPU-based mining rig, you are basically taking on building a computer system yourself. Be sure to have enough knowledge on some technical stuff like knowing PCI-e slots in a motherboard, purchasing risers, compatibility issues on Windows/Linux, modifying the BIOS of GPUs, and overclocking.

2. It will cause a lot of heat.

Since these machines are to be utilised 100%, expect that it will generate a lot of heat. In order to address this, have a proper well ventilated cooling system for your mining space. The least you wanna do is to burn your house down.

3. Expect your electricity bill to shoot up.

A typical six-GPU mining rig consumes on average of about 1,200 watts of electricity. That’s equivalent to a 1.5 horsepower air-conditioning unit running on optimal temperature settings.

4. Your daily income will be very volatile.

If you’re planning to make cryptocurrency mining as your full-time source of income, most likely, you will be converting most of what you’ve mined into cash. Prices of crytocurrencies are known to be very volatile. Even with Bitcoin as the gold-standard of cryptocurrencies, expect income to vary marginally. Your $100/day can easily be $30/day tomorrow with market swings and price fluctuations.Don’t get me wrong. If you accept these challenges, you’d be surprised how rewarding mining can be. Building and mining your own rig can be a very tedious but rewarding process with some free extra bucks in the course of doing so.But if you’re looking into investing your hard-earned cash into something really profitable, I suggest that you look into cryptocurrency investing and trading instead. There are a lot of exchanges where you can purchase and trade cryptocurrencies in order to gain profit similar as how you would do it in a stock brokerage firm. For starters, I suggest to look into Bittrex and Poloniex exchanges as these are the safest and well-known ones in the market. Here are some other links that you might wanna check out regarding cryptocurrencies:

Online forum for cryptocurrency mining and trading
https://bitcointalk.org/

Sites to gather data on cryptocurrency
https://coinmarketcap.com/
https://coin.dance/
https://bitcoinwisdom.com/
https://bravenewcoin.com/

YouTube playlist to understand how Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies work
https://www.youtube.com/playlist…

Andreas Antonopoulos YouTube channel
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJWCJCWOxBYSi5DhCieLOLQ

Securing your Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies
https://steemit.com/…/4-ways-to-secure-your-bags-bitcoin-al…

How to get started on the fundamentals of trading cryptocurrency
http://alunacrypto.blogspot.com/…/bitcoin-altcoins-trading-…

How to do basic due diligence on a crypto asset
https://medium.com/…/how-to-perform-basic-due-diligence-on-…

Guide to Ethereum
https://drive.google.com/open…

Guide to Bitcoinhttp://99bitcoins.com/

Due diligence on ICOs
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1792065.0

Guide to doing Technical Analysis on charts
http://www.investopedia.com/university/charts/
http://stockcharts.com/school/doku.php?id=chart_school

Where to gather the news on cryptocurrency
http://www.coindesk.com/
https://cointelegraph.com/
https://themerkle.com/
https://blockgeeks.com/
https://www.smithandcrown.com/

What is Mining
https://www.howtogeek.com/…/cryptocurrency-miners-explaine…/

Ethereum Mining
https://miningcryptocurrencyblog.wordpress.com/

Bitcoin Mining
https://99bitcoins.com/beginners-guide-to-mining/

Mining Profitability Calculator
https://whattomine.com/