It Is All About BTC, LTC, ETH, DOGE, KAS mining as well as other alternative crypto currencies
As Bitcoin popularity and usage continues to grow and along with that it is becoming harder and harder to be mined at home due to large scale mining farms all across the world. Furthermore the things get harder for home miners due to many ASIC manufacturers stopping to sell hardware to end users and focusing either on their own mining farms or supplying large mining operations such as KnCMiner and Spondoolies-Tech. Other companies getting bankrupt due to various reasons leaving just BitMain as pretty much the only Bitcoin ASIC miner supplier offering up to date hardware and shipping to home miners as well as mining farms. This turns users’ attention to cloud mining services, but these can be risky as we’ve seen from our own experience testing many such services over time. The two most significant risks with cloud mining services are them turning out to be a scam and running away with your money or the services turning unprofitable and stopping to mine as they are not able to cover the hardware maintenance costs. We’ve already seen many examples of both, but we’ve also seen some that are still here and continue to operate as we have been using them long term for about a year or so. We have listed the services we’ve been using long term below along with some that we’ve started testing more recently and we are seeing some good potential in them.
Using for a long time already:
– Genesis Mining is one of the most serious entrants into the cloud mining world that we’ve been using for about 12 months already. The company is trying to be open and transparent regarding its mining operations including their hardware suppliers to counter the mistrust issues. Daily payouts, transparency, multiple ways to purchasing cloud mining hashrate. Here is a special promotional code that is giving you 5% discount for every purchase you make – CryptoMiningBlog5.
– Bitcoin Cloud Services is a more anonymous cloud mining operation that we started using about the same time as Genesis Mining, though it is apparently over a year old now. Have changed their initial offer from 5 years to 1 (currently promotional 2 year contracts), but are still here and pay out mined earnings on a daily basis, offer attractive pricing and anonymity is a plus for some people.
– ScryptCC is the oldest cloud mining services we are still using – over a year and a few months already. It looked promising and worked fine unless you had an issue and needed to deal with support from the start, so we’ve had some mixed feelings about it initially. They are still here and still paying out, recently had some data center electricity issues that resulted in a few days downtime and lower profitability for a bit, but it seems that things are apparently resolved now.
Started testing these more recently:
– Mining Sweden is a relatively new entry in the cloud mining scene, starting as a smaller mining operation and with big plans to grow with the help of its users promising to share a part of their own profits. The service offers Mining Shares that are only for cloud mining and VIP Shares that give you not only cloud mining hashrate, but percentage of the profits of the operation. The service also offers users to buy BitMain AntMiner S5 ASIC miners and have them hosted in their data center. Could be a good long term investment as things seem to be working pretty well so far. Here is an extra 10% discount code from the regular prices that you can use, just enter ms10 during checkout
– GigaHash is another new and interesting entrant in the Bitcoin cloud mining scene. It is another small mining operation that is scaling well, started as a private mining investment and after that offering cloud mining services to broader audience. Currently sold out all of the available existing hashrate, but offering pre-orders for the new hardware that is coming to them in a couple of days.
– HashFlare is another new service that has recently launched apparently operated by a Bitcoin ASIC manufacturer, but a bit controversial one – HashCoins. So far it seems that the service is working just fine and is paying out, but be careful with larger investments in cloud mining hashrate here just in case. If you want to try it out, here is a promo code for 5% off for purchases over 250 GHS – HF15SMMR5P2 or 20% off for purchases over 2500 GHS – HF15SMMR20P2.
Over the past year and so we have seen many cloud mining services come with big promises and then go either turning out to be scams or failing due to some bad business planning etc. We’ve tested quite a few of these and lost some money on some, on some we’ve won even though they are no longer available, but there are still a few services that are still here, work fine and pay regularly to their users though we actually had some doubts about some of these.
One of the earliest large scale cloud mining operations, namely Cex has transitioned to an crypto currency exchange only and while it was operating as a cloud mining service the chance to actually perform well was to not only cloud mine, but trade your hashrate all of the time. This was true for many cloud mining operations that came with a built in market where users can sell hashrate, though this allows you to exit at any time by selling your hashrate. We did not like this concept that much as it takes a lot of your time to actually make profit and one of the goals of going the cloud mining way is exactly to save you the trouble of needing to spend a lot of time on the mining-related things.
Some Chinese ASIC manufacturers started promising cloud mining operations, but failed miserably or are going that road pretty fast. A recent example is the AMHash operation that had various issues pretty much from the start and is pretty much dead now. ZeusHash was another promising start with Litecoin cloud mining from a Scrypt ASIC manufacturer that has transitioned to a Bitcoin only and not very profitable at that cloud mining operation. Then there is Hashnest operated by BitMain that also had a fair share of issues and has been constantly changing what they are offering, making it harder for users.
We are not going to even mention various services that looked promising or not, but ended up being scams or services that were betting on the price of Bitcoin only going up or down for that matter and ended up disappearing because of that. So where are we currently cloud mining at and what is left as services that have been here long enough to be considered safer?
– Genesis Mining is one of the most serious entrants into the cloud mining world that we’ve been using for about 10 months already. The company is trying to be very open and transparent regarding its mining operations including hardware manufacturers partnerships to counter the mistrust caused by a lot of anonymous scams. Daily payouts, transparency, multiple ways to purchasing cloud mining hashrate.
– Bitcoin Cloud Services is a more anonymous cloud mining operation that we started using about the same time as Genesis Mining, though it is apparently a year old now and currently running an extended price promotion to celebrate their birthday. Have changed their initial offer, but are still here and pay out mined earnings on a daily basis, offer attractive pricing and anonymity is a plus for some people.
– ScryptCC left us with mixed feelings once we started using it back in February last year, looked promising and worked fine unless you had an issue and needed to deal with support. Well, they are still here and we are still mining with not that much hashrate, but the service is still paying out. There are some people complaining from issues with it apparently, so support could still be an issue, but unless you have to deal with it seems to be Ok. Still we would not advice to go with larger investment there.
Low crypto currency exchange rates, difficulty for Bitcoin and Litecoin going down, more Scrypt ASICs getting cancelled… in a situation like this how can you actually make profit mining, especially if using a cloud mining service? Well, the good news is that most of the cloud mining services are still up and running with ROI times just getting even longer than before, so it is hard to talk about actually getting a profit at the moment. At the same time however some services that promised long term contracts with maintenance fees included in the price are struggling to survive – bad planning expecting the price of BTC to skyrocket short term or well planned long-terms scams, it is hard to tell. The fact is that at the moment it may not be the wisest idea to invest in cloud mining hashrate, especially if you are not going to be paying for the hashrate with cash, but with coins that you have already mined or purchased at higher price.
– Genesis Mining remains one of the preferred cloud mining services thanks to being more transparent and open on their hardware partners and mining farms and who is actually behind the service, and also by offering some innovative and interesting features to miners. Their prices may not be the best out there, but at least they are here to stay long term.
– Bitcoin Cloud Services is probably the closest competitor with very similar terms to PBMining and prices for the hashrate. There were some concerns about the service when it launched, but it is still here a few months later, paying daily and offering attractive terms. Though since the business model could also be the same as PBMining if you have concerns you might want to go for other alternatives as well.
– Scrypt.cc is one of the first Scrypt cloud mining services from back when Litecoin was still profitable to mine with GPUs. We’ve had some issues with the service when we started to use it, then later on they were apparently resolved, but their services are not among the most attractive as they still rely mostly on their GPUs farms.
– PBmining has been having some trouble for the last few weeks with claiming to be a result of blackmail and operators personal data about the service operators leaking. As a result the service is apparently a “failing business” in their own words and “recovery is trying to be made”, no more hashrate is being sold and weekly payments are at just about 5% or less of what they should normally be. If you were among the early users fo the service you might have made some profit, but for people that joined PBmining in the last weeks it could be a serious loss. It is not clear if all was due to bad business planning or if it was a scam, note that the website is still online and there are still some payments being made, but that could also change at any time.
– GAW Miners is a company that started selling ASIC miners, then moved into cloud mining and are now moving to the next step – introducing their own crypto coin and building an whole ecosystem around it. They are essentially moving away from cloud mining services and moving to another business that they see as a better and more profitable alternative, we are yet to see how things will develop on the long term.
– Hashie is a relatively new service, but since they have partnered with the AMHash mining farm and started reselling their hashrate they have become a good place to get hashrate from. They were confirmed as an official partner by AMHash, a large mining farm operated by ASIC manufacturers, so their trust level has gone up and the price they have for AMHash hashrate is currently very good compared to other similar services.
– Hashnest is service for buying cloud mining and renting actual hardware miners operated by Bitmain, another ASIC manufacturer. The service had some issues in the past, but it stil running and trying to improve. They have announced a market where users can trade hashrate and get a better price per GHS, but even though you might be able to get a good price for the hashrate their maintenance fees have been quite high.
– ZeusHash has transformed from an ASIC manufacturer to cloud mining service provider, but unfortunately since they are not making their own hardware anymore and they do rely on other partners for the mining hardware their terms are far from the best. What they do try to do is to attract users with various incentives, some of which may work well, others not, but in the end people want to make money from their investment in cloud mining and this service may not be the best place for that at the moment.
– Chabat Mining is another new service that has been grown quite a bit lately by offering very attractive Scrypt cloud mining hashrate prices, but with the not so favorable situation for LTC at the moment it is questionable how wise it is to invest in Scrypt cloud mining at the moment. We’ve been having some strange issues with the service’s website, like often not being able to actually see our current mining status, but no issues with payments so far.
– CEX was one of the first large could mining farms, however with their maintenance fees going higher and higher the profitability of the service has gone down significantly. So at the moment you can say that it is more like a large crypto currency exchange with some cloud mining options available to make something extra when trading with hashrate and not only crypto coins.