I am looking for ways to passively earn crypto, faucets are nice for building up some SAT for gambling, but are otherwise not really worth the time, and I don't have the money to just buy and sit on a certain amount, no-regerets style.  I have heard that cointellect allows you to mine off a laptop, and that bifinex allows you to invest, with returns over time.  I would normally have jumped right in, but after shelling out large amounts on CEX.io vouchers and then finally selling them back at a loss, I realized that I shouldn't be making the mistake of believing a too-good-to-be-true sounding offer.

What are people's opinions of these services?  I don't know enough about the established economy, let alone the relatively new crypto-economy to make an expert assessment on my own.

Bought em a while back for $10 or so, have had a hard time finding much info on them. 

If anyone knows much about these, please let me know, especially if I can find vendors who take them.

Hi everyone, I received a free 1 week trial at https://hashprofit.com, and so far it has made me 0.06700BTC with 3 days to go.  This is dramatically better than CEX.io which plunders a good half your earnings with their BS maintenance fees.  I am curious to know if anyone thinks sinking a small amount of money into this site has any chance of being worth the investment.

Hmm, well I guess I should sell my GH/s on eBay, I always bought them below average price, so if I break even or recoup most of the costs I'll be happy.  I read your large cautionary post and was glad to see I wasn't the only one who thought the maintenance fees were unjustifiable extrotion (three times in a row the maintenance was greater than the gains from the block). 

You seem to be the most knowledgable on the subject so I would like to ask - is there anyway conceivable way to passively invest in BTC without getting screwed?  I like to make my money work for me rather than work for it, hence the draw towards cloud mining.  Is there a way to invest in BTC where something equivalent to the interest we see in banking/the stock market is possible?

Is mining generally unprofitable because after a certain amount of time the difficulty makes profit impossible?  Or is it simply inherent to the nature of mining itself?

I have purchased about 60GH/s on CEX.io, and in my search for other sites that don't bend you over and screw you with maintenance costs, I found other sites like GAWminers.  For a few dollars on eBay, I can buy 1-2GH/s of lifetime CEX.io mining, wherease on GAWminers and some of the others, you are looking at numbers such as $40 for 1MH/s.

At face value it looks like you can buy 1000x the mining capacity for a fraction of the price, but I am assuming the situation is more complicated than that.

How do we explain the discrepancy in cost per unit of mining rate?

If I was to spread out my cloud mining across some smaller up-and-coming sites, even if it didn't make a fast and easy profit, would it help the decentralization process?

Hi everyone, my introduction to cryptos started with Doge, I bought some online thinking it would go up in value as the market grew and more merchants accepted it- it did, then it dipped back down not much later.  Once I realized that there were other, non-novelty cryptos out there I found this site (http://coinmarketcap.com/).  I was overwhelmed by how many there were, but from my limited research most of them looked pointless (my Fedoracoin wallet wont even update blocks  ).  I took a primary interest in Bitcoin because it had the largest market and was the most well established (and was worth a whopping $500).  I read a few articles which made it clear that since I showed up a little late for the show, my computer was now worthless for mining.  When I looked up bitcoin on ebay to buy some straight up I instead found these lifetime mining vouchers where other people sell you part of the power of their machines.  Without doing any research I bought ~32 GH/s and a 200GH/s 24 hour contract for probably $50 in total.  Its been a day and I've made ~0.004 BTC (2 whopping dollars).  The contract turned a negative of 3$, and the lifetime vouchers have only made me about 50 cents so far (I was slowly buying the vouchers over the last day so I only hit 32GH/s in the last few hours). 

Before I get in too deep I wanted to get the input of more seasoned crypto-collectors.  Buying mining capacity seems sort of like acquiring stocks in the crypto stock market, and at Cex.io I also get other forms of currency (Doge, Litecoin, Namecoin, and some others I know nothing about), maybe if I invest in some of these up-and-comers I can forgive myself for not calling Bitcoin a waste of time ~4 years ago.

What are your thoughts on these vouchers?  I have a rule of not paying more than $2(USD) per GH/s, but enough small payments can add up fast, and at 50c a day my break-even time is gonna increase pretty quickly.  What does the future of mining look like?  Are we soon approaching the time when mining becomes a lottery game?