so why do people buy these contracts?
Mostly ignorance and their want to join the "crypto hype train". The same reason why people frequently get tricked into investment schemes. Even a quick Google search would immediately let them know how bad of an idea paying for cloud mining is.
Pretty much yeah.
OP suggested that people buying contracts because they expect price of bitcoin to go so up high that they're going to be in profit eventually.
But most of the time people sleep on doing math, relying on their expectations and assumptions
we all know that every bitcoiner expect a high price for btc but this isnt the main reason that someone pays for a cloudmining but because these people are lazy to run a mining on thier own , thats why they just pay for someone else to run it and get some comisions but cloudmining is also known to be one of the risky investment on this space . idk why its risky , because thier costumers are paying for the expense at the first place . if mining hardware wont run in the long run then why not they sell it and run another one