Quote from: PatMan on November 25, 2014, 03:05:07 PM

Quote from: raskul on November 25, 2014, 02:55:09 PM

Quote from: Biffa on November 25, 2014, 02:51:28 PM

Quote from: Sine(X) on November 25, 2014, 05:26:13 AM

Guys, do you plan to open cloud mining service?

Please god no.

Going by what has evolved in the rest of the 'cloud mining' market...

i agree. They should stick with building and selling hardware, it's what SP-Tech are good at.

Absolutely. The day SP-Tech do the cloud scam will be the day I stop doing business with them.

The problem for Spondoolies is that their main competitors are all offering cloud mining now and due to the extra costs of delivery, PSUs and electricity, cloud mining offers a better chance of making a profit from mining. Now, some of you guys clearly don't mind paying more to earn less but most people are in it for the money. Buying miners is simply no longer competitive for the majority of people.

Look at the SP20 for example. At 1152 W, you'd have the following costs for electricity:

At 0.15 $/kWh, daily electricity costs would be 1.152 kW * 24 h * $0.15 = $4.1472 or $0.00244 per Gh/s per day.
At 0.10 $/kWh, daily electricity costs would be 1.152 kW * 24 h * $0.10 = $2.7648 or $0.00163 per Gh/s per day.
At 0.05 $/kWh, daily electricity costs would be 1.152 kW * 24 h * $0.05 = $1.3824 or $0.00081 per Gh/s per day.

So what about having the SP20 hosted in a data centre? Toomin's seems to be a popular choice. For 12 months hosting, you pay $80 per kW per month. That works out to $0.00179 per Gh/s per day.

AMHash's maintenance fee is $0.00163 per Gh/s per day which is cheaper than having an SP20 hosted at Toomin's and the same as running an SP20 at 0.1 $/kWh. An SP20 costs $795 excluding shipping, which works out to $0.468 per Gh/s. That's equivalent to buying AMHash at an exchange rate of 389.71 $/BTC. For me, I'd have to add on $115 for shipping and $200 for a PSU, taking the total upfront cost to $1110, which works out to be $0.653 per Gh/s. That's equivalent to buying AMHash at 544.12 $/BTC. On top of that would be electricity costs of 0.24 $/kWh or $0.00390 per Gh/s per day.

Now, let's say Spondoolies were offering Gh/s contracts for 0.0012 BTC with a maintenance fee of $0.001 per Gh/s per day, would you guys honestly still prefer to buy an SP20? Do you honestly think the majority of people would?

Either Spondoolies starts offering cloud mining or it'll remain uncompetitive and sales will shrink accordingly.