Cloud Bitcoin Mining: Is It Worth The Investment?

Some days ago I found out about cloud mining!

I stumbled upon bitcoin a few years ago. You know, when it was like ~$15-20, but I thought nothing of it and went on my way. You can imagine my disbelief as recently, I was reintroduced to BTC at around $800!

I am still new to crypto currency, but I believe I've learned a great deal of information in the past few weeks. I would really like feedback about this investment idea. From my understanding, you can mine bitcoin utilizing a remote data-center with shared processing power among other customers. The upside to this is there's no huge startup cost and no need to maintain the hardware yourself. Although, there is the initial hash power cost, plus electricity and maintenance fees.

Before I include fees and the difficulty factor here's what it looks like:

This is considering the reward is 12.5 BTC/Block
This is considering BTC stays at $880.34

1 TH/s is sold for $100

Per Day - .00081074 BTC = $.71
Per Week - .005677516 BTC = $5.00
Per Month - .02467681 BTC = $21.72
Per Year - .29612172 BTC = $260

Difficulty looks like it's growing exponentially.

I'm assuming this means an exponential decrease in revenue from mining?

I also noticed the more hash power you have, the longer it takes before mining becomes unprofitable.
Now, including fees and a %10 difficulty increase every 2016 blocks(2 weeks). The calculator says if I buy:

1 TH/s, it will become unprofitable by March 2017
10 TH/s, it will become unprofitable by February 2018
100 TH/s, it will become unprofitable by January 2019

When I say unprofitable, I mean that buying after that point is a guaranteed waste of money, unless BTC rises enough to keep up. Speaking of which, tell me what you guys think! Is bitcoin going to keep rising or will it bubble? If there is a variable I forgot to include or an inaccurate value let me know! Good evening steemian buddies. ☮

Credit: Mining Calculator and The Graph

I had like 6.5ths in genesis mining, lifetime contracts. They stopped paying me for some reason.

Probably the electricity costs of the contract became more than the payouts, so the contract stopped paying out. This can happen as mining difficulty increases, so lifetime contracts are not really for life after all.

Do you want 2 genesis mining account?

in the new year: learn more about mining

Haha, yeah I'm trying to understand it all. There is soo much to learn

Basically you'll get scammed or you'll lose money. Casinos are more fun ways of burning money I hear :)

Hahah, thanks. Might try some btc poker...

I have various mining contracts with Genesis Mining, and all but one of them have been unprofitable. I would have been better off simply buying and holding from an exchange like Poloniex. Also many so-called cloud mining companies are scams (Genesis Mining is one of the few reputable ones).

Lesson learned: stay away from cloud mining.

I've heard of some companies scamming their customers.. that's a risk in it's own right.

Great information to put out there!

I have cloud mining contracts with a couple of operations and universally the decay in rewards has made them unprofitable. The only way you can make a profit is by referring others to either get a ongoing commission or mining power boost.

Thank you!

I had hoped somebody here had experience with this. I suppose it could potentially be a good investment if BTC rises fast enough, but it seems like a more likely scenario is to just break even.

I only took the smallest contracts to try it out. I used Genesis mostly with ETH dagger hash and X11 for Dash / XMR plus did a ZEC contact recently.

I am no longer a fan of cloud mining. I do well on Bitclub but that is because I have a team of over 30 other people working with me. My Genesis Mining contracts are absolute crap.

Ahh, I see. Well that's unfortunate. Thanks for your input :D