As readers of my blog know, I will only promote products and/or services that I myself use or invest in. I wanted to provide an update to the cloud mining contracts that I recently purchased. Cloud mining works differently than traditional mining in that you do not purchase any hardware to do the mining for you. This means you do not incur large electricity costs associated with owning your own machine. It is all done by others and you are simply buying into a pool. When I started them on May 23rd I wasn’t really too sure what to expect.
Since two weeks have passed I figured I have a good amount of data and info to provide a solid report. The first contract I started was with Hashing24. They only offer Bitcoin mining. The way it works with them is you buy whatever hashing power you want (for more on that see my post “mining”). They have plans that are as low as 100 GH/s and cost as little as $18. Because they offer indefinite contracts, you pay a small daily maintenance fee of $.033 per 100 GH/s.
The upside to Hashing24’s model is that once you pay your upfront amount you can theoretically collect daily payments forever. In that manner it is similar to buying an immediate annuity.
In the interest of full disclosure I purchased 4500 GH/s ($800). After the daily fees are subtracted and, depending on the value of Bitcoin, I make around $7 per day. If we extrapolate that out it would be about $210 per month with a break even point of just over four months. That’s not too bad an investment because everything after month four would be pure profit. One thing to also keep in mind is that the mining difficulty will increase in the future which will eat into your profits.
On May 25th I decided I wanted to start a contract to mine Ethereum. The Ethereum blockchain technology is being embraced by all the major crypto companies and I actually believe that it will one day pass the value of Bitcoin. It currently about half its size with a market cap of $20,505,000,000 compared to Bitcoin’s $41,888,000,000.
I purchased my Ethereum cloud mining contracts through Hashflare.io. At first I purchased 35MH/s and later to decided to add another 15MH/s. The contracts are for one year. Hashflare also allows you to change the percentage of hash power you want in each pool. If you see one pool performing better, you can put a higher percentage into that one.
The cost for 50MH/s was $1,090, but I got more bang for my buck because I paid in Bitcoins and the value of my Bitcoin purchase appreciated. This meant that my Bitcoins went further and, in reality, effectively cost me around $900. Let’s go conservative and take the higher amount of $1,090.
The calculator on their site predicts that at the current price of Ethereum ($223) I would make $2,358 off my $1,090 investment. That kind of return makes it worth the risk to me.
Again, because I am a long term investor in both Bitcoin and Ethereum, I view this as a solid opportunity to diversify your portfolio and at the same time attempt to make some passive income. Keep in mind that cryptocurrencies are extremely volatile and that can wildly impact your potential profit. Do your homework first. If you are a long term investor in cryptocurrency, this appears to be a worthwhile play.
David Astman
