Cloud Mining for Crypto Coins
In the world of crypto currencies Cloud Mining as a service has earned somewhat bad reputation and there is a very good reason for that. There were just too many scams out there that have resulted is many people actually losing money after investing in such services. There are of course some companies that have earned a name of being serious players in the crypto cloud mining game, but their number is much smaller when compared to others that at some point ran away with a lot of their investor's money.
What is cloud mining?
This is essentially a service that offers you to mine a given crypto currency for you and you are essentially renting their mining hardware and getting the mined coins in return as a payment. Usually you are paying form a given hashrate that you want and for a certain period that you rent it for, an example would be renting 10 THS for 1 year period for mining Bitcoin. Depending on the terms of the service you may have to pay additional fees for electricity and/or maintenance often on a daily basis that gets deducted from your mined coins or you pay for that upfront. Some services even advertise Lifetime contracts for Bitcoin mining (or other crypto currency), but there is a catch with these as by the lifetime they mean that it will mine until it generates profits.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Cloud Mining
There are some clear advantages to cloud mining that are making it attractive for many users. These are the fact that you don't have to buy actual mining hardware, don't have to set it up yourself and monitor it, don't have to think about the electricity it uses, no need to think about the heat and noise generated as well. The disadvantages are that you don't own any hardware after your renting contract ends (if you did, then it probably wouldn't be worth much for selling), you may have to pay more upfront to start mining (depending on the hashrate you purchase), you are not sure if the company will be there until the end of your contract (there is a risk involved).
Real Mining for Crypto Coins
If you are interested in mining for crypto currencies yourself you are probably going to be doing that at home and even to get started you will have to have a bit of knowledge about hardware and software in order to get everything setup and ready (crypto as well). Alternatively you will need to have a friend to help you or find somebody to pay to make everything required for you (not recommended). You need to think about a good place to use for computer mining rigs or ASIC miners. These usually use a lot of electricity, give off quite a bit of heat and are noisy, so you need to think of a way so that any of these will not bother you while you are at home.
If you are mining at home using real miners you can have full control over what you are currently mining, though that also requires you to monitor everything and make sure that it is fully operational and does not give you problems. You can decide if you want to mine a coin and hold everything you mine for a period of time or you can sell immediately a part of it to cover costs. You can also decide to sell the hardware at any point of time should you decide to stop mining as it is no longer profitable or you can only shut down for a moment the miners and bring them back online if things change after some time. You have full control over everything, unlike when you purchase hashrate at a cloud mining service.
Depending on what you are using as mining hardware - ASIC miner or CPU/GPU mining rigs, you may have two do different things. With ASIC miners you should plan that they will quickly get outdated and their price will significantly reduce over short period of time. ASIC miners do come faster, but they are also more limited in usability as they are designed to work only for a specific crypto algorithm. If you are using a computer for CPU or GPU mining you will generally be much better in terms of value retention of the hardware itself over much longer period of time (if you care well for it) and you will be much more flexible as you can switch between the mining algorithm used. So using computers for mining rigs does seem to be a better long term investments than going for ASIC miners. With ASIC miners the timing is very important, so if you manage to get on time you can make a quick profit, but if you are late in getting the mining hardware things will be just getting harder and harder to even ROI. When an ASIC miner comes out for a given crypto algorithm it quickly makes mining with CPU or GPU pointless, so if you want to continue mining a certain crypto coin that got an ASIC miner you will have to buy an ASIC and switch your mining computer to mine something else.
Not Mining but Buying Crypto
You may often hear people recommending that you should just buy some coins on a crypto exchange instead of going for cloud mining or actually mining with some mining hardware at home. This is actually a sound advice for people that don't want to risk getting scammed by a cloud mining service or don't have the knowledge and time to mine themselves, but have some money that want to invest in a crypto currency. While this may be a sound advice to follow it is also one that can carry a greater risk if the crypto currency you invest in does not do as good as you might expect it and becomes worthless in terms of price after some time.
If you have invested in mining hardware that you own and not in a cloud mining service then you should be able to mine different coins and get a greater portfolio (you can also buy into multiple coins and not just one). Even if all of the coins you mine end up being worthless at some point you will still have something left for the money you have paid for the mining hardware. Of course investing into computer hardware for mining is the best option as you should be able to get more money from it at a later time should you decide to sell it. It is more flexible and usable as even if you don't sell it to another miner you can always find a gamer to buy video cards for instance.
What is the Best Advice
There is no right or wrong here, so the answer to Cloud Mining vs Real Mining vs Buying Crypto is not easy. What would work best is if you don't do just one, but instead try to get into couple of things. Yes, it may be harder, but then the risk of losing everything invested in just a single thing is also smaller. Usually the lower the risk, the less profit you can get, and the higher the risk, the higher potential profit may be, but it is also not impossible to lose everything all at once.
Be extra careful with investments in cloud mining services, go for ones that have actually proven themselves over time and not new ones that just launched and are promising you to get rich in no time. Plan carefully should you decide to mine at home yourself, not just with ASIC miners, but for computer mining rigs as well, do the math and be prepared for the worst while hoping for the best outcome. You can also invest some money directly buying promising crypto currencies, but be careful with these as well and carefully consider what is really promising. Once you manage to get some coins, no matter what way, be careful if you get too tempted to start trading on crypto exchanges as doing a bad decision and risking too much can also lead to significant losses.
In the end the best advice is probably to be more careful and not risk everything on a single decision, try to play it more on the safe side in order to avoid being sorry later on!
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