Cloud Mining

Bitcoin cloud mining can be a tricky thing to determine if it's completely safe in the Bitcoin world, and if it is, will it be cost effective? The return on your investment can be longer than other alternatives such as buying and selling Bitcoin.  This can be due to the fees involved, the time it takes to mine, the upfront costs and the value of Bitcoin during that time. The upside is that if the costs are reasonable, the cloud mining operation has good rewards and the price of Bitcoin rises, you will more than likely end up making a healthy return on your investment. 

Your first task is to find a reputable cloud mining provider. One of the best ways to make sure you have a reputable service is to look on industry news sites, forums, and reddit sub-forums to check out lists of cloud services and customer feedback on them. Many times you will find that people will post about their experiences with different services, exposing scams or detailing why a service may be legit.  A thing to keep in mind as well that many scam services will buy advertising on everything from forums, news sites and subreddits. So be careful and do your due diligence before you spend your money.  If you see an ad for a service but cannot find much information on it ask on a forum or subreddit, contact the news organization that you saw the ad on and ask for feedback. Many times someone will know more information or at least be able to provide guidance.

Bitcoin.com has launched it's own cloud mining pool with competitive pricing, which you can register for and begin cloud mining today.

When you have discovered and researched the cloud mining service you want to use you need to then take into account the following things next in deciding to buy or not.

• Price per gh/s or th/s
• Service fees (some are included in the purchase of your hashrate as opposed to recurring fees)
• Time to ROI (this is very important as even a legit service may cost so much that to ROI the time frame could be unrealistic with difficulty levels moving up and BTC value not climbing enough to help get your ROI on your purchased hashrate)

If you have decided that your chosen cloud mining service meets all of your mining requirements then you purchase your hash power and sit back and watch the Bitcoin rewards come in. You do not have to setup or maintain any equipment, listen to it make noise and generating heat.

Pros and Cons of Bitcoin Cloud Mining

Pros

• No installation or setup costs (hosting centers will host Bitcoin mining gear you buy and run it at their location. Many will charge a one time setup fee)
• No noisy, heat generating gear in your home.
• Maintenance is taken care of.
• No extra equipment to buy to have your mining gear running.
• No risks of fire and other issues that can arise from running it yourself.

Cons

• You do not own the equipment which means you cannot sell it.
• Some you cannot point your hashrate at the mining pool of your choice.
• Some providers will cease operations of your chosen cloud miners if a profitability threshold is too low as difficulty goes up and new equipment comes out.
• Company can go out of business or just run away with the funds if they want.
• Could end up a scam as promised payouts are unable to be met as hashrate was oversold (selling more hashrate that they have) and owners decide to cut and run as they did not put some of their profits into upgrading to new gear as it comes out.

While this is a lot to keep in mind when looking for a cloud mining service if you do your homework you may have things work out okay.  It is never a guarantee when you do not have control over your mining gear. Always keep that in mind.  

So as you can see cloud mining while being a good idea on one hand can be a risk on the other hand. Just like a normal stock investment, never risk more than you can lose, and do your homework first before investing.