When your gut tells you something maybe not worth your time, maybe you might just have to listen to that nagging feeling you have. For a long, long time I have avoided cloud mining like the plague...not so much for the return on investment angle but more or less for the validity of trust I had for the companies out there. Cloud mining comes with a trust factor you don't seem to have to have in place when you buy your own hardware and mine at the house, this is why for my longevity already I have had in crypto I tended to buy ASICs and GPUs always because I highly doubt my own machines can screw me past maybe I push them a little to hard and kill them myself.

With all that jibber jabber said, I am here to admit to you that the buzz about Genesis and Hashflare lately had me kind of second guess my convictions if they might be the two cloud mining services actually doing right by people. Genesis was my top choice but they kind of sold out the hashes on the Sha256 so I was kind of left with no option but to deal with giving Hashflare a shot and feel out cloud mining because everyone seemed to recommend them.

My dabble with cloud mining lately is less about income and more about adding a little more hash power to my already running miners. I am a collector of mining gear and lets just say if you came to chill with me at my house, you probably need to bare with the heat and the loud fans all around you lol. Conversations are better had outside on my back porch vs inside with the struggling A/C to keep up with my miners. This my friends is why I looked into cloud mininer, I figured well its time to put a few hashes outside of the house so I signed up for Hashflare a few days ago.

Hashflare seemed okay, low hash buy ins and a lifetime contract for Sha256 and Scrypt mining. Meaning as long as it was profitable to mine, they would let you run those hashes you purchased non stop, well until Bitcoin flops out which I highly suspect to not be the case as we go through time ahead.

I will state this before I rant about my experience, I am awaiting an answer on my ticket still over a purchase not yet redeemed so I may hear they will correct the first issue I have with Hashflare but its already been almost 4 days so kind of feeling like this is poor customer support anyways.

My first issue with Hashflare goes as follows. I bought up a few hashes with a coin called EMC that they take. Small purchases seemed to go smooth as heaven but when I dropped a nice $60 purchase on them...it went into limbo and sits in a TIMED OUT purchase state in my Hashflare purchase history. I did some digging, I am no newb when it comes to blockchain and my purchase went straight to their wallet so I am left sitting here wondering where my money is at or my hashes. With that aside, I figured send in a ticket and I am sure to hear something, still waiting 4 days later and still no hashes to be seen which has stopped me from adding more up to this system.

Then came the kicker that has finally made me realize I am good to just buy more GPUs and stay clear of these mining cloud farms. Today after only being with these guys for a week, I get a message in my account as follows from Hashflare which I suspect all users got:

Dear users,

The cryptocurrency industry has always been susceptible to a high amount of volatility, and recent global changes have been some of the most significant. Due to an industry-wide hardware deficit, many market participants, especially mining hardware manufacturers, have to adjust their operations, procurements, terms, and prices of ASIC miners and their delivery.

Per Section 5 of Hashflare Terms of Service, SHA-256 and Scrypt contracts are now also subject to change. The changes, which mainly cover the terms and the prices of the contracts will become effective on September 1, 2017.

The new price for 10 GH/s of SHA-256 will be $2.40, while 1 MH/s of Scrypt will now cost $11.50. The maintenance & electricity fee will remain the same.

All new SHA-256 and Scrypt contracts will be issued for a limited term of 1 year from the moment of activation. All SHA-256 and Scrypt contracts activated prior to 01.09.2017 will expire on 31.08.2018.

Sincerely,
Hashflare.io team

So it appears a Lifetime contract no longer means Lifetime and now only a year, plus they have doubled their buy in fees so needless to say I am outta there before I even started. Now I get it, business is business and sometimes the rules have to change but when you offer a set contract...to me breaching that contract is not something to back or constantly feed more funds into. I fear for those that put heavy amounts of funds into this machine because I have a funny feeling there are some users that spent thousands if not more about to wake up to reality what they thought they were getting is not really the case

For me its not a big deal, not too happy about the purchase I made that most likely has disappeared for life. $60 to me is not something I like just tossing out the window but I consider myself lucky to have so many issue hit me so early on with a service like this before I feed more income into it. So hopefully they correct that issue and I can get what I put in back out within the next year lol, but over all my gut instinct to mine in a cloud mining service is now officially dead sure to avoid.

Today I purchased my 4th GPU for my fig, got my ASICS on non stop running so I am content to monitor my own hardware from this point on. This write up though is not scare anyone away or to bash those that have done well with cloud mining, I suspect a few people have. What this is about is one huge advice I can give out there, research...go into these things with light funds and see how it reacts. Just be careful because losing a lot to something you think you can trust is nothing I want to see happen to anyone. Maybe Hashflare is on the up and up but this message today and the hike in fees with a loss of my finances within a few days of testing the waters is for me something to not trust. Be careful out there, crypto is going to get crazy soon and if they can get you they will!