Quote from: FP91G on May 07, 2025, 02:48:18 PM

I warn everyone to check the payback of such projects. For example, if I buy such an ASIC and mine at 5 cents per kilowatt without any additional expenses and taxes, then I see that the cloud mining service offers me more favorable conditions.
They do not pay taxes? They do not have expenses for salaries and infrastructure?
If you install an ASIC in someone else's mining center, then you are sure to pay a certain amount of money so that the company can recoup investments in the construction of mining locations.

I think you're conflating miner hosting, cloud mining and marketplaces.

Hosted mining like Compass or Sazmining sell you an ASIC upfront and then host it for you at one of their facilities. As you point out, this involves paying electricity and other hosting fees for them to cover the costs of running the miner for you plus a premium because they don't do it for free... All of this should get factored into your payback time.

Cloud mining services like BitFuFu and Bitdeer, are like front offices for bitmain mining farms that sell time of their own machines at a premium. They either self-mine or if a buyer shows up to purchase hashrate from them, then they sell their hashrate at a premium. I don't think you're likely to make money here, but maybe it's an on-ramp if you're paying in fiat or you're willing to pay the premium for coinbase sats...

Marketplaces like Nicehash, MiningRigRentals and Rigly also sell hashrate at a premium, but it's a two sided marketplace. You have miners from around the world that go to the marketplace to sell their hashrate where they set at what % over FPPS. Last I checked on Nicehash ~5% and closer to ~10% on MiningRigRentals. Rigly uses an auction mechanism to set the price.

I work at Rigly where we've been developing a hashrate marketplace for 3 years now. We've been trying to align incentives so that buyer's can mine at a profit, which is hard because that means miners have to take a loss, i.e. sell their hashrate for less than it will produce. The most straightforward way we found was to trade time preferences: hodlers have low time preference and miners have high time preference to grow and upgrade machines. We found sellers who are willing to sell their hashrate at a discount if they are paid upfront. Buyers provide miners liquidity at a fixed-rate, similar to a loan, and they pay buyers back in hashrate, where buyers receives hashrate until they've mined the established fixed-return. Everything is calculated in sats using the daily hashprice as the valuation method.

Th important difference between hashrate marketplaces and hosting services, is that in marketplaces the cost of electricity, maintenance, and running the machines is abstracted out because it's only about how the seller markets/commercializes the actual end-product, the hashes themselves. From an accounting standpoint, it's just about the top line, what's the revenue? Who is paying the machine's owner for the hash it's producing: their own fpps pool account, an individual paying the premium or a financier who's allowing them to upgrade equipment or new operations ahead of schedule.

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