I see many loan requests on the various P2P lending sites for upgrades to cloud mining contracts. Some of them quite large and many of them getting funded. In the short term these look like good opportunities for both parties but a look at the fundamentals of this strategy show how it falls apart relatively quickly.
1. It costs about 3 times as much per GH/s for sha 256 or MH/s for scrypt as it does to buy a physical machine to do the work. This effectively puts your break even (NOT RETURN ON INVESTMENT!) around 200 days or more for these cloud contracts.
2. Your breakeven point is around 200 days and not return on investment because you do not have any underlying value with the contract (unless it is a gawmining hashlet that you can resell). With a machine your return on investment is helped somewhat by owning the machine at the end of the mining period.
3. With every increase in difficulty your investment pays less and less. Sometimes as much as 20% less as is the case with bitcoin. This difficulty is reset often and at the present time only goes up. Altcoin is a little better with the difficulty moving sideways for awhile until the next wave of machines hits the market.
4. Price volatility also diminishes the value of what you are mining. Especially with the recent fall of bitcoin.
5. At first the cloud contracts pay enough to enable you to keep up with your loans and make you think you are doing well but inevitably as the days wear on your return will be less and
less, eventually going to near 0. Those new lifetime hashlets will not produce anything within a year and their value will be 0 as the hashrate they represent becomes more and more obsolete.
6. This scenario leads a borrower to always posting new loan requests and upgrading their cloud capacity to try to keep up with the diminishing returns but they will really never make any money. Only the cloud companies will.
7. Once they get to the point of not being able to get enough loans or provide their own capital, the whole house of cards will crumble.
8. This is why it is very important to lenders and borrowers to be sure of their strategy and hopefully move more to having physical miners that can pay for themselves before they are totally obsolete.