I bought a Genesis Mining 1THs contract somewhere in August 2015 for 1.96 BTC. It's been 6 months now and till date I've recovered hardly ~0.4 BTC. And for the past 3 days they are paying 2000 satoshis only. WTF! Free faucets pay more. Seriously I earned 50,000 satoshis only for clicking captchas every hour in the last 4 days which I have even transferred to my wallet. And on the other hand I'm stuck with a so-called lifetime contract which pays me only 2000 satoshis a day and might be suspended any day now.

What really bothers me is the stipulation that if costs exceed payouts then they will suspend our contract and the way things are going recently I'm quite sure they would seize our hashpower too without any reason way before any of the other cloud miners do.

In my opinion Genesis Mining isn't worth your money or time. I won't go so far as to say that it's a scam but I've comparable hashpower on Hashnest s5 (which I sold day before yesterday for a loss in exchange for s7) & Gigaghash sHash2 and their payouts are still 20 times better than Genesis as on date.

Funny thing is miningsweden was the first cloud miner where I had invested in August 2015 too and initially I hated it but turns out I have made BTC 0.16 from only 100GHs hashpower. Compared to Geneis that's easily 4 to 5 times better payouts for the same duration and hashpower.

I had recently posted a foul mouthed rant on Genesis-mining's official thread which got deleted but that doesn't hide the fact that it's payouts are utter garbage.
And if Genesis with all it's 'transparency' and 'polite talk' does end up suspending mining contracts then I guess it would be one of the best heists ever pulled of in history.

A word of caution to newbies from India or other 3rd world countries- be mentally prepared to lose money in the short term and forget about RoI on cloud mining. It's never gonna happen. And those who say they have earned good returns on so or so are either the scammer themselves or had entered the BTC scene before 2012 thereby having the first mover advantage.

When I bought my first BTC in Aug 2015 to invest in Genesis mining's rubbish contract BTC was trading for $230. Today it's ~$380 after having risen to $420 in Dec 2015. So long term investment is definitely one of the best alternatives if you have the patience and if BTC still continues to exist. Day trading isn't my forte besides there are too many bots on the scene.

Practically cloud mining contracts are good only for 10 months from date of first release till the next gen mining hardware pops up or block difficulty increases.
Through cloud mining you would at best recover 70% of your invested principal in US$ terms. Forget about profit. If BTC price does break through the $1k mark by end 2017 or even $600 mark by end 2016 then you would have made a good investment (it's a very realistic possibility with the upcoming block halving in July 2016). Even real estate in a decent neighborhood needs min. 5 years to double in value here.