Hi! Thanks for stopping by. I think what is attractive about the cloud mining (which I'm still learning about) is that 1) you don't pay any power fees, 2) you have guaranteed hashing power for a certain amount of time, and 3) no overhead investment, or equipment maintenance. Would it be better to get like an Antminer s9 and set up your own rig? Definately. But most people don't have the knowledge or motivation to learn all of that stuff, myself included.

The maintenance fees on Hashflare are a percentage of the daily payout in the coin you are mining. Its always between something like 10 - 20%. So they can never get higher than the coin you are producing.

Also about raising difficulty etc - I've thought about this and crunched some difficulty numbers as well as hashrate productivity numbers. If you follow increasing difficulty trends, you are still going to end up in the green at the end of the contract. Of course, assuming bitcoin (or the coin you are mining) doesn't tank.

I would recommend just buying a bit of hashing power so you can get access to the user interface and learn more about the metrics. On your account page, you can change the mining pools you use, and it shows you revenue forecasts and amount of crypto generated with respect to current difficulty rates, so you can do your own calculations.

What I like best about it personnally, is you are locked in to a hashrate for 12 months once you buy it. So yes difficulty will go up in the next 12 months, but value of the coin will also increase (ideally). So you'll be effectively mining less and less over time, but so will everyone else, and the value of the coin should increase accordingly. What is bitcoin skyrockets to 60,000 in the next 6 months? Well if you own some now, it'd be great. But lets say you dollar-cost average in as your investment strategy... then your initial invest gets WAY higher as time goes on. But if you lock into hashrate now...then even as the coin shoots up in value, you are still mining at a steady rate.

Just my thoughts/rambles. But I think it's a nice passive investment for someone getting started in crypto!