Re: Cloud mining, profitable or not?

The decision to use cloudmining services depends on your needs.

There are some people who want to get involved personally (hands-on). Cloud-mining is not for them.

There are numerous other people (many of them almost without any basic knowledge or experience in altcoins) who would be willing to learn but think that this is a difficult task for them (e.g. setting the miners themselves etc.) and/or people lacking the space to have their own miner.

As far as profitability is concerned it all comes to lucky guesses as it always is the case in the crypto world. Can you find a good coin to mine before it becomes a main-stream hit, then you will have profits. Did you put all your money to mine a scam coin you will lose.

Nothing in cryptoworld is straight forward!

Just my 5 cents!

These kind of people should not be involved with mining. If you don't have the time or the energy to get involved with physical mining then you don't need to contribute to the demise of a currency by helping to centralize it. If you promote cloud mining are you promoting centralization, particularly if you are supporting large mining entities like cex.io. That would be like people wanting to get involved in helping put out a fire by standing with a garden hose while blocking the path of a firefighter with a 3" line.

There are many ways to get involved with crypto and make money. Mining is but one aspect. People are looking for easy money and they think they can throw some cash at a website and have more cash come back.

I do not think that we should leave mining only to the hands of "experts". If we want cryptocurrencies to be really decentralized we should try and get more people involved. How on earth are we promoting cryptocurrencies if we tell people who want to learn more and get involved but do not have the required skills (at the moment), e.g. older people lacking even the basic computer skills to stay away. This elitist approach will not help spread the word and promote decentralization. The lesser people involved the higher the centralization. I think this is the equation.

Please also note that there are other issues which make physical mining more difficult. To name but a few, high electricity costs in some countries, import taxes, lack of space in an apartment, etc. All these issues are resolved with cloud mining. But the most important thing is to find a respectable vendor and as it is always the case in crypto world only spend what you can handle to lose.

Either you did not read my post in entirety or you did not understand it. Trust me when I say my stake in BTC is far larger than yours and I hope it succeeds. I have seen all kinds of scams and problems arise and these have been overcome.

I'm not saying only experts should mine. if that were the case only Satoshi and the devs would be mining right now as nobody would have started. I don't even have a job related to computers - I'm a physician. What I am saying is people should not be getting into mining without knowing the slightest bit about mining. Throwing money at cloud mining promotes the very centralization that you say would be the demise. You think the cloud mining companies have their hash spread over 46 pools?

Mining is just one aspect of BTC. There is no trust needed unlike banks and the current fiat system. The due diligence remains on the community. If we the community can't ask a minimal level of reading before jumping on mining then this effort is doomed. If you're mining you have internet access. Every bit of knowledge on this board is offered for free. All it costs is people's time. People who can't spend 1 hour to do some basic reading and understand that even a 10 year would understand should not be mining IMO.

Maybe you have misunderstood me too! My point is that cloud mining is a nice entry level for people to get into mining and during this process to start adopting and learning more about mining and cryptocurrencies in general. You cannot attract e.g. older people who have only basic computer skills in crypto world if you ask them to learn how to set a miner themselves. I am not a computer expert but I can say that my computer skills are average or above average but it has been a pain when I have started to setup my miners at the beginning. So my point is that with cloud mining you can convince more people to get involved and when more people get involved we can achieve decentralization. When more people hold BTC, LTC etc. then it is less likely for whales to manipulate the crypto world. When more people start to get interested about cryptocurrencies they will start to research more about this. This is the way that I got involved in this, and I think that nobody was an expert before entering the mining world. Mining is fun and research and as you say due diligence is a must! See what happened to Cyprus and the bank deposits confiscation for example. Who could imaging this 2 years ago? So, I also do think that you should due your own due diligence before choosing the right provider. Using a trusted and respectable company is a must or else you may very well see your money lost forever!

But why mine!?! Mining is keeping the network up and the only reason people are concerned (the masses anyway) is because of the block subsidies. In 2 years it gets cut to 12.5 per block.

How many people know about credit card PCI compliance? Probably less than 1% of people out there and yet everybody in the US has a card. Everybody uses GPS but less than 10% even know what the initials stand for.

For Bitcoin to thrive we need decentralization. For that we need people running small rigs in their house that are easy to set up. My Antminer S3 is worlds ahead of the BFL single I bought last year. It has not come to the point that it "plug and play" - maybe when Google, MSFT or AAPL get involved.

Having a mining company that is 20% of the network sell you small amounts of TH/S that is fractionally truncated via software is not my idea of decentralization.

As I have already mentioned earlier mining is also fun. And import taxes and high electricity prices make physical mining difficult if some cases (my case too). So unless you live in a country with low electricity price and low import taxes cloud mining is a really convenient solution!

Having built my own farm I know mining can be fun. But for the very noobie people you were talking about mining would not be fun. Those kind of people can barely operate a PC - why would they want to stare at graphs all day long. They would want to go to Bloomindales and spend their BTC.

For those where it makes no sense to own the miner in their house there's always colocation centers. These would allow the miner to chose his pool or p2pool and help decentralize rather than have all the power herded into one place. Colocating miners is cheaper than cloud hashing and you get the pride of owning your own hardware.