Cloud Mining Put to the Test- Is It Worth Your Money?
In my opinion, most of these companies are just Ponzi schemes in disguise and the few who may be legit

This guest article was written by Ofir Beigel, the founder of 99Bitcoins.
I’ve been looking for ways to generate a profit from Bitcoin ever since it hit the news back in April 2013. With so many options you sometimes find yourself lost. Should you buy and hold, day trade, mine at home, start a bitcoin exchange, I can practically go on forever about ideas for making money from Bitcoin.
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But one idea seems to catch the eye of most of my blog readers more than any other – cloud mining. For those of you who are unfamiliar with cloud mining, it’s basically “renting out” computing power from a company with a mining farm so you can participate in the latest gold rush of Bitcoin mining.
Ever since Bitcoin became popular back in 2013, the difficulty to mine increased drastically. This meant you needed to buy expensive hardware, find a place to store it and of course cool it (since Bitcoin miners tend to heat up quickly), only to exchange it with an even more expensive piece of hardware after 6 months, since the difficulty went up yet again.
The Promise of Cloud Mining
Enter cloud mining. A magical solution to solve your Bitcoin mining problems. No need to buy expensive hardware, find storage space, pay electricity bills or take care of cooling. All you need to do is “chip in” with a larger company on their mining expenses and in return you will get a portion of the earnings.
When you deal with cloud mining you rent out GH/s or TH/s, which measure how much computing power you will be able to mine with. But is this really worth the money you spend on it ?
I have to admit I was never a big fan on mining myself, it always seemed too technical and I preferred to just go ahead and buy my Bitcoins. But since I got so many emails lately asking me to look into cloud mining I decided to put it to the test.
In order to see if a mining contract is worth your money, you basically need to calculate how much money you will make from the money you invest. Just like any other investment, you want to check your ROI. To accomplish this I’m going to use a mining calculator, which is a small piece of software that does all of these calculations for me.
So armed with my mining calculator off I go to test the profitability of cloud mining:
Our first stop is probably the most reputable cloud mining company today, “Genesis Mining”. Founded at the end of 2013, Genesis Mining is a company of 10 employees registered in Bermuda.
The company used to offer Bitcoin mining contracts and Altcoin mining contracts but it seems that today they only offer the former. I’m not sure why this is, but one assumption could be that it’s related to the decline of most altcoins in the past year. Prices start from $22.49 per 0.05 TH/s and all the way up to $19,500 for 50 TH/s.
The interesting part about this pricing model is that unlike other cloud mining companies, there’s only a one-time fee and not a monthly fee. Having said that, if you take a closer look at their pricing page, you’ll see that it states, “For lifetime contracts as long as the contract is profitable, a small maintenance fee is deducted”.
It took me a while to find out what the fees are, but it appears that Genesis Mining deducts 0.0015 USD per 1 GH/s on a daily basis for mining Bitcoins. We will keep that in mind in our calculations.
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Now let’s see how profitable we can become using Genesis Mining. We’ll start out using the lowest price possible and just get 0.05TH/s. At the current difficulty and exchange rate we would be making about $3.59/month, or $0.1196 a day. Let’s not forget to deduct the fees that would be $0.0015 * 50GH/s = $0.075 daily (this is 62.6% of the total profit!). So this brings us to exactly $0.046 daily, or $1.338 monthly.
This means we will break even after 16 months. Not sure I’m willing to wait that long to get my 20 bucks back. If I take a look at purchasing 1 TH/s for $419, I get a monthly profit of $26.44 which basically gives me the same outcome since the fees are calculated linearly.
Moreover, there is one thing that is missing from this equation. Well…actually two things. We have no idea what the Bitcoin exchange rate will be in five months or a year from now, nor what the mining difficulty will be. This is what makes cloud mining a bit risky.
I mean if Bitcoin booms again, we can cover our whole investment in just one month, but if it goes the other way around….you get the point. Same thing goes for the mining difficulty.

It seems that the difficulty is evening out lately, but it’s mainly due to the fact that so is Bitcoin’s exchange rate. These two parameters tend to be in a positive correlation to one another. Meaning if one goes up so does the other. But they have a negative effect – a higher exchange rate makes you richer, while a higher difficulty rate makes you poorer.
But Is It Legit?
But here comes the really interesting part:
Some people consider cloud-mining companies to just be elaborate Ponzi schemes. Meaning there are no huge mining farms located in some remote location and no major mining operations. Some people believe this is just a way of luring in customers and using their money to pay out the customers who came before them.
In my recent research on BitcoinTalk and Reddit I found some interesting perspectives on this. I won’t name specific companies but I will review several of the claims made:
- Companies bait you in as a customer using attractive prices when they start out and then change their pricing or fees after they’ve hooked you in.
“They are still trying to attract new customers to buy at roughly the same price we paid initially… at the rate it is going we are on track to reach negative returns. At which point our contracts would be cancelled after 10 days of negative returns. Meanwhile we are locked into these contracts with no option to sell. Please stay clear of this service!” ~ BitcoinTalk user
- Other than the initial payment for the mining power there are hidden fees which consume most of your profit.
“Last November I invested just over 1 btc… since then I earn daily 1/3 of what I should be making, from my investment, the other 2/3 are fees.. I guess?
And for as for roi, its going be a very, very long time seeing I am earning less then 5 cent a day @ 60 gh/s.” ~ BitcoinTalk user
- Almost a year ago a question was submitted on Reddit asking, “Do mining contracts ever make sense ?” This question was answered by Gavin Andresen, the chief scientist of the Bitcoin foundation, who stated:
“No, they make no sense. I suspect many of them will turn out to be Ponzi schemes.” ~ Gavin Andresen, Chief Scientist of the Bitcoin Foundation
I have yet to find any positive comment, post or thread about cloud mining that seems unbiased. A lot of these cloud mining programs supply referral programs which give people an incentive to sign other people up (another characteristic of many Ponzi schemes).
In conclusion, I guess cloud mining still hasn’t proved itself to be a legit and profitable answer to generating a profit through Bitcoin. In my opinion, most of these companies are just Ponzi schemes in disguise and the few who may be legit will take you a long time to profit from. However, in the event of another boom in Bitcoin’s price I may just as well be eating my hat. In the meantime, I’d bet on buying the currency and not mining it.
At Genesis-Mining you will never get your ROI. Never. Allow me to expand your calculations with my very own ROI calculator, which takes into account difficulty increase every 14 days, and MOST importantly it takes into account block halving, wich ABSOLUTELY nobody else takes into account. Let’s assume a 1 TH/s at their current price of 419 USD and maintenance fees of 0.0012USD per GH/s, which is 1.2 USD daily (36USD/month, fixed, forrrreverrrr). Let us also assume that the recent spike on the exchange rate will hold forrrreverrrr too (we cannot predict exchange rates, but let us be optimistic here).… Read more »
At Genesis-Mining you will never get your ROI. Never. Allow me to expand your calculations with my very own ROI calculator, which takes into account difficulty increase every 14 days, and MOST importantly it takes into account block halving, wich ABSOLUTELY nobody else takes into account. Let’s assume a 1 TH/s at their current price of 419 USD and maintenance fees of 0.0012USD per GH/s, which is 1.2 USD daily (36USD/month, fixed, forrrreverrrr). Let us also assume that the recent spike on the exchange rate will hold forrrreverrrr too (we cannot predict exchange rates, but let us be optimistic here).… Read more »
I have 4 Tera Hash of cloud mining with Genesis Mining and I am dismayed to see my daily return go from 0.017btc to 0.0038btc in the past couple of months. Negative returns are on the horizon unless the value of btc goes through the roof and the so called experts have been saying it will happen for months now but it never will. The finish line keeps getting moved forward!!:(((
wwell.. 6 months on and it went up…
Assumptions and “fixed forever” 🙂 Well I think a lot of people get into their own mining and cloud mining with some knowledge that with the current situation they may be lucky to get a ROI however many would be prepared to watch ongoing “theoretical” losses in the hope that the value of BTC will be $3000 or $1000000 each one day. As long as you haven’t put your life savings into it, better to put your beer and smoke money into this and then if it turns into a future bonanza, what was all that crap about “never get… Read more »
So what now…? Is the only way to profit from this actually buying low BTC and selling high?
It seems then that once again this innovative product has lent itself to scumbag cloud mining ‘providers’ looking to profit off unsuspecting users of their wares! On the other extreme, trading BTC/USD on a currency trading platform is probably about the riskiest thing one can ever do! Problem is, BTC is not a trading currency to buy and sell at a profit, it is ultimately an asset one must accumulate as the new way of transacting seamlessly without banks involved.
I am betting on BTC being worth much more in a year or two, I started to buy when it was about $400 gradually kept buying more and more even when it was $650 and so as an average I got the total at a fair price. Bought a ton of ethereum at around $14 and dumped it at $21 just before the DAO crisis and the profits I rolled into BTC. You have to work it and read stuff to be on the ball. Waiting for BTC to go up so I can get back my investment, but am… Read more »
Just about every review of cloud mining is filled with techno jargon and multi decimal fractional numbers, but I have yet to find a single miner giving a real and honest ROI percentage straight up and devoid of all the geek speak and bullshit. There certainly appears and will always remain to appear to be an awful lot everybody is desperately trying to hide in amongst all the smoke and mirrors and until some one starts speaking plain financial English no one can be blamed for doubting the integrity and real viability of cloud mining!
I am not sure that due to the variability of being able to find blocks to solve you could ever give a firm figure for ROI, I guess they could do it by understating the return and when it does better, which could be often, they can keep that cream off the top.
I agree most of them are Ponzi scheme.. but not all. In my opinion if the site survives 2 years, they are legit. Currently using Genesis and i can see i will get ROI after 5 months. Of yourse, i dont pay full price for my contracts. Im using promo codes to get discounts.
CLOUD MINING = PONZI SCAM!
Many people say all cloud mining is scam because we have seen many cloud mining scams. However, its not true all cloud mining are scams. But you shouldnt go for obvious HYIP that pays you 3 % interest each day. Look at Genesis Mining, Hashflare, Hashing24 and ViaBTC for example. Of course, a legit cloud mining company can fail since its a competitive market.
Thanks, cryptocoinzone.
Genesis Mining is great. The best thing ever. So far, I have not had any problems and I hope this year will be even better.