nicehash is a middle man rental service.

it is not cloudmining.

There are many ways to earn Bitcoin. You may engage to mining, investing, bounty campaigns and air drops. The easiest way to acquire an amount of bitcoin is to invest but you may also consider joining bounty campaigns. Personally my token holdings of not onky Bitcoin are mostly from bounty projects. I do receive token rewards from bounties in which I used  to trade for Bitcoin. Mining is also a good way in order to acquire Bitcoin but I would say it would be costy in a sensr that you would need equipments such as PC, and ofcourse it would consume electricity ( bad thing if it is expensive in your country), and time also. I do believe that there is no such thing as "easy" way, every method have weights including financial, time , and effort matters.

I am still into bounty projects even if most of the projects are failing and even if the requirements or standards in order to be able to participate is more strict.

I suggest  you make use of Nice hash. It is easier for Newbies and will connect you to a good amount of hash power sellers. They have a variety of good Pools available on their platforms. As long you paid your rent, you are free to do whatever you want that Asic rental site.

Like many of us have said, stay away from Cloud Mining!
Buy Bitcoin using coinbase or another exchange for the beginning, transfer them to your own wallet and just enjoy having bitcoin in your own wallet.

During that time, read up on and educate yourself.

Mining is no longer profitable for solo miner and if ever you plans to invest on mining, you will need literally tons of money to begin with because mining hardware is expensive and you have to consider other mining cost as well, like electricity.

For trading, I will advise you to learn what we call technical analysis (TA), so that you can get yourself some knowledge on how to play trading, otherwise you will be burn and loss in the trading game.

For beginners though, you might as well just buy bitcoin and then hold, simply as that.

Welcome to the forum!

Investing in Bitcoins, wise choice!
Just make sure you read about Bitcoin, as Bitcoin can be volatile.

Mining is such a big term, mining yourself will most likely not be worth it.
Mining Equipment is very expensive and investing in Mining Sites are mostly scammy!

I would use FIAT and buy some Bitcoin, store them in a Wallet or use Trading to increase that amount.
But before you start trading, read and educate yourself. Its not as easy as it sounds!

Join the forum there is alot of valuable info here

A good forum for Beginners is:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=39.0


There are also ways to earn Bitcoin, it will be small amounts but it will get you started:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1629118.0

Before deciding to invest in crypto currency I think this article  can help you to know about the risk involve https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/339935 .

And here is the list of ideas you can do in crypto investing.

1. Hodling  -  any crypto currency you think is good to hold even  bitcoin for long term .
2. Mining  -  mine your favorite currency can also give you income
3. Lending -  there are many website you can do this even here in this forum you can lend your money to other user's
4. - invest in gambling -some  popular gambling sites now open for investors to invest in the sites   bankroll
5 - trading  - You can earn 1%- 10% in daily trading depends on how good  your skills are in trading.
6. Masternodes - you can earn passive income in Coins like dash ,but the problem about this is the price of the currency is volatile the price of the coins you are staking is different  the day you buy it and the day you earn from master nodes.

Its just a suggestions every investment have risk that you should know before deciding to invest your money.

If you plan on joining a pool, what will you be connecting to the pool? ASIC miner or GPU/CPU mining rig?

You can try savings accounts on the Binance exchange. For some coins, they offer about 15% per year. However, keep in mind that most of the fixed deposits have already been purchased.
In any case, the full list can be found here. https://www.binance.com/en/lending

I am holding BNB, ETH, and also running NRG masternode. I plan on investing in these cryptocurrencies for a very long term because of the potential and use cases that the team is working towards. Their prices are very cheap at the moment and this is the perfect time to invest in them.