Bitcoin Forum

I have been looking into mining for a while now.

Seems there are two kinds of mining operations:

Cex.io where the price per GH is never going to make a profit mining bitcoins, but is at least legitimate (not stealing your money)

and all the others, which show an ROI on GH/s in 50-70 days.

Most of the second type seem to have newly registered sites, a slick/simple layout, unrealistic pricing, a strange inability to demonstrate that they are actually generating ANY coins at all.

Mining lease companies are the new ponzi, imo, and from my personal research it looks like 90% of the ones out there are ponzis.

In before all the "no way man, I gave them 1 btc and they gave me back 0.09 this week so therefore no way are they a ponzi"

I can't even convince some people Leancy is a ponzi so this is hopeless.

We need a subforum in the Gambling section for most mining sites

And you ask a question of a "company" like PBMining asking for proof of coins or even just a PIC of their mining farm and they respond

I was looking forward to PBmining adding some hashing power and reopening sales, but when they jumped from 14th to 29th in a matter of days it made me a little skeptical.

I asked for proof of coin generation or even a pic of the mining farm but he said neither can be provided due to sales contracts or it could risk jeopardizing their operation:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=418183.640


So, as a newbie to mining, can someone explain what the reasons for this are? why would showing which blocks they mine be a security risk?

Not every terrible investment is a Ponzi scheme. Please use the proper meaning of words.

Mining will most likely lose you money. The seller / operator of a mining program will most likely make money. Doesn't make it a Ponzi scheme.

I know what a ponzi is, I used it completely accurately.

Many of these so called "mining" sites are simply taking peoples money and returning it to them and claiming it's mining profits.

That is a ponzi.


At no point did I call all mining programs ponzis, I said many are simply ponzis.

Not bad! I used it

Date Registered:    Today at 08:02:51 AM
Posted:    Today at 08:10:37 AM

http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/500x/43160495.jpg

Hello everybody,

I certainly do not hope that all of them are a fraud. I just bought 1 TH/s at http://pbmining.com?ref=iflash11 (http://pbmining.com?ref=iflash11) and I do hope it was not a foolish investment.

@Piggles: I absolutely hear you (I read your word slinging match with one of their admins). But unless the site suddenly disappears we will only know if they are legit if somebody tries to make some money with them. I try this now. And I will keep people posted here.

Ahhh, btw: Everybody can see my stats here (I am user #2332): http://pbmining.com/?p=stats

So everybody can follow how I am doing. Maybe I just threw a couple of grand out of the window but my gut feeling tells me: I did not. Still, that does not mean that I will generate revenue. It depends also on how difficulty develops among other things.

Let's see …

Best


iFlash

Honestly, I just don't understand why he won't prove he generates coins or has a mining farm.

There is no reason not to at least point to some blockchain transactions.

Anyone can view who is mining what blocks.

Why on earth is it a secret for PBmining alone?

It reeks of scam.

But good luck to you :)

Let's see. I will find out in the next weeks/months to come. And so will everybody that follows my stats and posts ... ;)

See, for me 9 BTC is quite a bunch of cash. It's money I can afford to loose, but still it would hurt, of course. But BTCs in general are a risky thing. So whether I buy BTCs and wait for them to increase or mine them myself - I do not see much of a difference regarding the risk level.

Fingers crossed and happy mining everybody!

This

Well, when everyone knows that ponzi is ponzi, it is not really a ponzi since no one is lying to any one here.

If there ponzi people doesn't know it is ponzi, yeah we have a problem here. Some evidences would be nice, but we all know it is a problem.

@Piggles - My guess is that pbmining doesn't actually have an asic farm and they aren't generating any blocks. They're probably renting hashing power from someone else at a lower rate and/or using a mining pool. If they purchased asic hardware, and they're selling 1 gh/s for about $5, so that means they had to have purchased 1 gh/s for less than $5, minus maintenance (power, etc).  You figure they want to make a profit, so add another 20% on top of that, right?  Where is one going to get 29Th/s for about $3-$4 a gh/s?  Right now, antminers are around $4 a gh/s, but they purchased equipment early on, just a few weeks ago antminers were about $15 a gh and that was the lowest. Let's say they purchased a bunch of hardware from KNC in November (650 gh/s @ 6000), that's still over $9 a gh.  So, they either financed a lot of hardware on credit and have a 5 year payback plan to a bank or investor or they are banking on btc/usd(cad) will rise significantly.  If you look at the early ebay sales for them, they were selling USB block erupters, so maybe they financed the farm that way.  Either way, there is no reason why they can't tell you what mining hardware they use.

Here's the other kicker with cloud mining, you have to generate more sales revenue than your mining farm would generate through mining only for the owner, otherwise, what's the point? 

i mine and make a very healthy profit
although i mine scrypt and n-scrypt. i won't touch SHA even with Satoshis stick.

Yeah bud i'm only talking about the mining operations selling GH, not people mining for themselves

Exactly.

Until proven otherwise, 90% of these sites are scams imo.

They all accept bitcoin only, have forwarding addresses, are shady about proof they even mine etc.

Please stop using the term "ponzi" if you have no clue what it means...

It's true that most of these mining sites are risky, and even the more legit ones ARE NOT for newbies trying to make a quick buck.

Are you retarded?

"A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to its investors from existing capital or new capital paid by new investors"

This is what I am saying:

Fake mining operation takes money, pays back investors a small percent of their own money claiming it is "mining profits".

How is that NOT a ponzi?

It's really quite simple. Don't ever send money (for any reason) to anyone you don't have good reason to trust. And with that ends almost all (if not all) of these "mining" operations.

You should have read their thread. It's a ponzi.
They're overly defensive, use bullshit reasons to hide their identity and refuse to give any proof there is actually a farm.

They've been outed several times so far and have never provided any satisfactory answers to reasonable questions about their legitimacy.
But apparently people don't care and keep throwing their cash at them, because "they paid me, so must be legit".
Because clearly getting paid 10% of your investment over time means you're not going to lose out on the remaining 90%.

are there any legit ways to hire hashpower on my own pool?

You might be right. You might be wrong. I simply don't know and I think as of today nobody can say for sure where the truth lies.

But I will see in coming weeks what's going on. In about 12 weeks I can say for sure whether this was a bad idea or not. By that time I should have mined enough coins to have the investment cared for.

The point that I "worry" much more is: Probably by that time (in 12 weeks), my hashing power of 1 TH/s won't be good enough for generating any significant profit on top of the coins mined to pay for the investment.

It all depends on how the difficulty changes over the next 3 months.

I might be lucky. I might not be lucky.

It's a bit of a casino.

But in this case you're not a new investor, you're a prospected customer. This IS different.

A scam, maybe. A Ponzi, no.

lol you make no sense

At least you're in good humor about it :-)

Customers are not investors. Investors are share holders. Customers and investors play entirely different roles in an organization.

A Ponzi scheme is a type of scam that defrauds investors.

If I overlooked where you were investing in this company, I apologize.

These people believe they are investing.

I have come to the conclusion that Mr. Piggles mission is merely to warn about a possible scam but bash people that don't follow his recommendation to not buy hash power from pbmining.com

I am hoping now for two things really:

1. That I will have my money back home in two to three months with pbmining still in business.

2. Having a great laugh at this discussion here.

Agreed.

I found myself making a similar mistake several weeks ago.

Somebody claimed disk capacity prices were dropping "exponentially", and I accused them of not understanding what the word "exponential" means. The word is mis-used so often that I start to assume it is always used incorrectly. In fact, disk capacities have gone up exponentially, while prices have remained relatively flat.

In this case, no Bitcoin is not a Ponzi; but it is very possible that these "mining" operations are.


This is a very good question. Even if these "hashpower for hire" outfits have the hash-power, it is dangerous to simply trust them with building blocks on the Bitcoin network. Hashers are not miners, and Bitcoin network doesn't need them (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=411099.0).

I'm not bashing anyone, i came to this forum primarily because I wanted to join PBmining, and all I got was accusations of initially being a shill for them, and then people accusing me of not understanding what the word ponzi means, both of which are patently untrue.

Indeed, I don't quite understand the multiple accusations of misusing the word.

Charles Ponzi set up a company which claimed to make huge profits off arbitrage on international return coupons. I suppose all the people who believed they were "investors" were really "customers" since they were prospected and therefore Charles Ponzi wasn't running a Ponzi either.

Being a miner myself, I don't think mining was designed at it's heart to be a ponzi. That being said, there are some interesting parallels that can be applied, some out of context (admitted). 

So, if you take the principals of a ponzi from wikipedia...

"The promoter vanishes" - Satoshi (although, nothing is paid to Satoshi from miners)

"requires a continual stream of investments to fund higher returns" - As difficulty rises, you have to purchase more GH/s to continue to earn or get a higher return.

"External market forces, such as a sharp decline in the economy (for example, the Madoff investment scandal during the market downturn of 2008), cause many investors to withdraw part or all of their funds" - The collapse of Silk Road and Gox....

"A Ponzi scheme claims to rely on some esoteric investment approach and often attracts well-to-do investors" - Buy mining equipment as preorders which half the companies are running scams. There are legit companies though, but we've all seen the scams.

"In a Ponzi scheme, the schemer acts as a "hub" for the victims, interacting with all of them directly." - The blockchain and bitcoin network? 

Anyway, I just thought these were interesting in light of the topic. I personally don't think it's a ponzi, I'm a supporter of bitcoin and believe it will revolutionize the future of online transactions. I think we are in the very early stages of mining and bitcoin itself.

 

I think several people in this thread are mistaking this thread for an accusation against bitcoin and mining in general.
But rather, it's a remark regarding the rise of "companies" claiming to sell mining contracts.
However, instead of actually mining bitcoin, these companies rather use a ponzi scheme using the investment made by users to pay them out in order to fake legitimacy.

This practice doesn't have much to do with bitcoin itself and mostly just relies on how long it takes for investors to see ROI.
This leaves them plenty of time to pull more "customers" into their scam, before ultimately disappearing into anonymity.
It's a very low risk setup for them and requires only minimal effort. Customers will provide all the funds they need to keep up the sham for months on end.

Any company going to great lengths to hide their identity while claiming to provide a legitimate service shouldn't be trusted.
The most likely scenario is they need the anonymity to disappear after having suckered a sufficient amount of people into the scam.

Thank you for explaining this.

I thought I was missing something, I didn't realise they were missing the point entirely and thinking I was attacking bitcoin mining in general.

This thread is about a few mining firms which are scams, not mining in general. I thought that was quite clear.

Maybe if you said "mining contracts, the new ponzi", it would be clearer. 

As for mining hardware sellers that claim ROI in a set period of time... ehh... it would be nice to be told about projected difficulty increases, but it is bitcoinland where you gotta do a lot of homework. 

The way I see it?  When buying the hardware, you don't necessarily have to mine for bitcoin.  At the moment I don't think that there are any better options for SHA-256 coins when it comes to mining, but who's to say that it won't change as ASICs potentially become more ubiquitous?  You're buying a SHA-256 ASIC, ready for what could be the equivalent to scrypt's dogecoin.  Or you don't care to mess wif any exchanges, or you want to support a SHA network of your own, like Mazacoin...

sorry if I missed the point also, though. q_q

Yeah I have a weird habit of reading threads rather than just the title. lol

Changed thread title.

Sorry, I did miss that point on the thread, but have been following the thread on pbmining and whether it is a scam or not.

I don't think all mining-as-a-service companies are scams, but I do think several of them bank on the fact the newbie is not well informed about mining in general. Case in point, the 5 year deal that pbmining offers, what value are gh purchased today going to be worth in 5 years? Most hashing power purchased today declines rapidly in effectiveness towards an ROI. The only way that would change is if difficulty fell, which I don't see happening in the future at all.

So I think companies like pbming are banking on that, raising capital through sales quickly to fund the purchase of more hardware to fund more sales, rinse, and repeat. I don't think that's a sustainable business model. If anything, it's a pyramid model...

There's another thread here where a mining company looks like a ponzi, it sold bonds (LabRat) and then decided to change the payout structure per bond. Well, as you can imagine, everyone is flipping out because it turned a bond into something nearly worthless.  Check it out https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=251423.3720

Given the answers received from pbmining when asked reasonable questions about their farm, I'm convinced there absolutely isn't a farm and payouts are not the result of bitcoins being mined.

Many users do understand the service companies are claiming to offer, there just are several companies out there (like pbmining) that aren't actually offering the service they claim to provide.
The accusation towards these companies isn't from the lack of understanding their service, but rather from the lack of even remotely plausible evidence being provided by these companies regarding the existence of their farm.

its not "ponzi", in my opinion. Its all about the investment someone can do.

If there is no actual investment (revenues paid from new participants), it is a Ponzi.

Given the lack of transparency with most if not all of these schemes you might as well (and should) assume they are fraudulent until and unless proven otherwise.

Do not send money to anyone for any reason unless trust has been demonstrated in a transparent and verifiable way. If people followed this simple rule, these so-called mining operations as currently structured would all disappear.

Incidentally, one way to prove that that actually do have mining hardware is wait for it... "proof-of-work"!

A hashing operation that wants to prove that they have the hash power you purchased, needs only to point it at a pool that you specify. You can host the Pool yourself (for example using P2Pool), or tell them to use one of your Bitcoin addresses while pointing the hasher at one of the more traditional pools.

This while hash-power is still concentrated in one place, people would notice if an attack is under-way because the hash power they are paying for would suddenly disappear.

Edit: some mining/proxy software would need tweaking to split the miner into smaller blocks. Logical sub-units for ASICminer hardware are per-chip at 0.333 Ghash/s. Each chip seems to mostly ask for work independently.

Only if everybody does that. If only a few people do it they can fraudulently run on fractional reserve.

First off;
BTCig props to anyone who owns 18/45 posts in their own thread. BTCallin

Secondly;
Props to Mr. Piggles for callin' it like he sees it, irregardless of it's truth or widespread espousal.

Third;
Nooo!! Gaieus!! Gaisues!! is ponzi!!! Confirmed I know how to berate someone for no reason AND wrong raisone! Nah ugh!! I know how do that and then also after you, 2!!!

In summation;
YES, Mr. Piggles knows what a ponzi scheme is. Jesus fucking christ on an avalon eruptor stick... I couldn't give less of a fuck what the definition, cut and dried of the concept of a Ponzi Scheme is after this incessant and unwarranted Pggle-bashing. The fuck

BTCrilliant. Thank you for weighing in.

/thread

Is there a way to see how many post someone has in a thread or did you manually count them?

In regards to PBMining, I have been with them since their first week with the website up (first 100 customers) and although I can't guarantee it is not a scam, all I have to say is if it is, they have the best customer service ever for a scam and it was very well thought out...

If you are interested in purchasing with PBmining, please do so through my referral link as I will greatly appreciate it!

PBMINING.COM  BUY NOW: 0.0083BTC/GHs 5 Year Contract (http://pbmining.com?ref=RyanK)

We are just a small company selling mining contracts.
We built our own system from scratch. No glossy website, no big promotional budget.

My wife handles customer support and scheduling, I created the system she uses.

Now we are expanding.

GHashForCash.com is the system we created over the past 4 weeks.

Because after all you have to give back your referral fees if it turns out to be a scam and people lose their money right?

And what assurances can you give that you are creditworthy so people should send you their money and trust you to send something back? Are you posting proof of your physical identity and assets so if it turns out that you are ripping people off, they can easily sue you? Are you posting a bond?

What have you done to credibly demonstrate your trustworthiness?

Mr. Piggles,

Regrettably, there are a few bad actors in the cloud-mining business.  However, it's unfair to paint all of us in the sector with such a broad brush.

As a show of good faith and to demonstrate that not all cloud-mining companies are a "ponzi", please accept our offer of 20 GH/s of free cloud mining for 1 week. All we ask in return is that we live up to our end of the offer; you let others know that we kept our word.

Please email us your contact information via the forum, and we'll email you.  Sound fair?

How does this "demonstrate" that you aren't a ponzi? It doesn't. At best it means nothing, at worst it is bait meant to lure in even more investors/suckers. You realize that practically every ponzi scheme in the history of the world started out with some good returns early. That's what lures brings in the suckers and makes the scheme work.

Thank You, Smooth, but we are not reliant on attracting any new customers in order to payback early customers.  Our customers mine independent of what other potential new customers may or may not do.

How can we independently verify any of that, and how will you be held accountable if it turns out not to be true?

Are you posting proof of your physical identity and assets so if it turns out that you are ripping people off, they can easily sue you? Are you posting a bond?

You realize that every ponzi operator says "I'm not running a ponzi scheme" so that alone can't ever be used to tell the difference between legitimate operators (if there even are any -- I have my doubts) and fraudulent ones.

Demonstrate clearly and verifiably why you (especially YOU with your "Activity: 6") should be trusted or expect people such as me to continue warning people not to trust you.

Yes, you can learn more about us via our website.  Additionally, you can always follow me personally on Twitter @TheBitcoinGirl

It looks kinda fishy.

Doing a reverse image search on the photos posted here (http://www.coinfirma.com/about-us.html):
One works for a casting agency and the other is an actress.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryansfelton doesn't mention CoinFirma.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm5042024/ seems odd for an actress to do customer services.

To be fair it says that right on their page, so in a sense you are verifying their claimed identities...

EDIT: https://cgov.sos.state.ga.us/Account.aspx/ViewEntityData?entityId=4822146

Because my husband doesn't mention it on his LinkedIn profile, it's all a lie?

Tell you what, I'll update his LinkedIn profile right now.

Good grief...

Except you'd expect the linkedin to mention CoinFirma, and the actress to have something better to do than CS.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryansfelton - Updated... ;D

As I said, not *all* mining companies are "ponzi* schemes.  And to cry "IT'S A SCAM" just because something wasn't listed on LinkedIn of all places, is a knee-jerk reaction.  

Piggles, our free offer still awaits if you're interested.  

Come on man, its a family business of sorts and actors often do other work in between gigs. Would she seem more authentic if she were waiting tables?

(Assuming everything is as it appears, which you never know in this space.)

Thank you, Smooth.  Remco just doesn't understand how the acting business works ... and it's a hobby of mine, not a full-time job.  I have no delusions of being Meryl Streep :)  I'm committed to our business and I'll be happy to reply to your support emails.

Remco - I assume you saw that my husband's LinkedIn profile was updated?  ;-)

Well look at that. Mining contracts that might be slightly legitimate. That's new.

I never said all of them were bad, but some are so deliberately vague/sketchy that there is no possible conclusion other than scam, imo.

PM sent

I counted manually. Post ownership proof of word intact.

Disclaimer: I've signed up with coinfirma for their free 20 gh offer, so yes I am a paid shill.

However - this is what a mining site should look like, imo.

Verified payment methods - check (verified with bitpay)
Mining direct to wallet - apparently so (will see as it mines)
Open and clear ownership - yep
Physical address - yep

They certainly are on the non shady end of the spectrum as far as cloud mining companies go imo

mining contract = I mine coins and give you a less return than what you could have bought them at market price for, from my experience. I paid $45 and got about $10 worth of coins. Wow!

Anyone have experience with scrypt based hosted mining contracts. Looking into this site https://www.minerking.com/ but the prices seem way too good to be true.

It is hard to say if a company is a ponzi, there is no way to tell from a website. The only way would be to see the companies mining equipment.

Don't forget the fees and mining cost added on top of the shiny advertising figures.

The costs of minerking one time mining:
* you pay 49/59 USD for 10 THash / 100 PHash of LTC/BTC one time mining plan
* a fee is added on top for payment, in case of one plan each this was 7.38 USD

Now for the fulfillment of the mining part. As of today you will get:
* approx 10 GHash/s of BTC mining / 1 MHash/s of LTC mining, i.e. fullfillment will take approx. 10 million seconds (~116d)
* revenue for BTC is split as follows: you mine 0.0000007 BTC/min, deduced is cost of mining 0.000000112 BTC/min and keep 0.000000588 BTC/min
* this will yield 0.098 BTC (advertised are 0.124 BTC)
* revenue for LTC is split as follows: you mine 0.0001291 LTC/min, deduced is cost of mining 0.0001123 LTC/min and keep 0.0000168 LTC/min
* this will yield 2.8 LTC (advertised are 3.33 BTC)
* at  current echange rates (500 USD/BTC, 14 USD/LTC) this would pay back 88.2 USD, not counting the difficulty increase.

Conclusion: Figures may change in the future (and difficulty increase lets me expect the change will be for the worse) but as of now an investment in minerking one time mining will not only pay less than advertised but will not ROI. In contast, you will lose approx. 1/4 of what you paid in USD.

I am a developer at www.altcc.com We offer Scrypt, Scrypt-N and SHA256 mining contracts. We let you choose your own pool and there are no hidden fees. You pay and we start. We have just recently redeveloped the website and are adding features to it. Check us out at www.altcc.com

5 year and perpetual mining contracts are a scam. First of all it is very unlikely that any one of these mining contract sellers will be around in five years (much less perpetually), and whatever mining capacity you buy now will likely be essentially worthless in a year or less due to increasing difficulty.

You know what a mining company could do if it wanted to demonstrate that its 5-year mining contract is not a scam? Put the money in escrow with 20% to be released to them each year when they deliver (or better yet 1 2/3% per month), with the remainder to be returned to the buyer when they shut down or disappear. We won't be seeing that any time soon.

There is still value in mining contracts.
Getting what you paid for and having access to first class customer support are the key, as it is with any business.

Have to agree, 5 Year contract seem risky. Not just in the longevity of the company, but also the relativity of the coin.

Mining Contract are great way to get higher hash rates for shorter periods.

Our clients seem to be satisfied with 120hour (5Day) contracts with reasonable disclosure on expected yield.

http://808Mining.com powered by GHashForCash Network of Independent Miner Operators.

Maybe after the hardware hits an R&D wall (i.e., 14nm and smaller) would 5 year contracts begin to sound remotely feasible.  Otherwise, so much changes in the space of months in cryptocoinland, so my general thought is "no."  Keep in mind that the environment for mining hardware is extremely small scale, not to mention that the market cap for bitcoin is still in the single digit billions, not even close to that of Google.

If institutional investors start pouring their money into bitcoin and related businesses (imagine publicly traded mining companies, or ASICs for $99.99 @ Target), imagine how those entities taking advantage of economies of scale would wipe out everyone else.  I doubt it'd take three years to accomplish that, let alone 5.

3 months and less would be my limit.  IMO, the best reason to get a mining contract would be to corner the future supply of a particular coin such as DOGE (as of this moment); unless you've got rich friends in high places, bitcoin is too far gone.  for now.  the hardware is evolving way too fast for now.

my 2 mBTC.

This is not Ponzi of course.
Ponzi scheme depends on new investors. And most of "cloud hashing" services depends only on fake promises :)
But they have many gullible people in common :)

shut up and read the thread before repeatign the same stupid shit other people incorrectly already said.

many of the ponzi mining sites offer referrals and depend on new investors

So referral programs = ponzi? You talking shit.

How you get from A+B+C+D to "is absolutely legit" is a complete mystery.

The best you can conclude here is that it might be legit.

People with 6 day old accounts showing up and posting this makes them look shady, if they didn't already.

I certainly agree with your last sentence. CEX is hugely overpriced.

I have experienced both CEX & PBMining ...previously i invested in cex and never knowing their structure of Maintenance fees...i mined there for almost 3-4 months and later i realized most of 30-40% of my mining profits were taken in form of fees... for which i blame myself for being so naive in first place for investing without understanding.

But now i have moved my investments to PBmining and i see the payouts are given weekly on time as committed in contracts...since i felt i'm getting double hashrate at the same price @CEX .


Having said above..please understand that every site does involve some risk...and i haven't seen any site (mining/markets) without risk...please use ur judgement to evaluate them and think twice before investing..

Future will tell if a site is offering Ponzi scheme or a trading market will file for bankruptcy

Read the thread dumbfuck

chill everybody, lets try to keep this forum peaceful

I bought some online contracts from PB Mining to diversify my mining assets and I like the idea of not paying electricity at the time.  I also got the generic response you mention but that's not common exclusively to the ponzi scheme industry.

It does look ponzi'ish in nature but if we look at think realistically and do some math.

1- Bitmain AntMiners, S1's included, power 20% minimum of the BitCoin network
2- BitmainTech S1's are relatively cheap at less than $400 USD per unit (Currently) from the manufacturer; which you need to buy in at the right times.
3- When I bought 200GH/s, the price on PBMining would show a solid $200 profit for them compared to buying an S1 & PSU for it.

Consider the following:
-Right now, the price is 0.0058BTC per GH/s
-The AntMiner S1 is about $450 right now or, 0.885 per unit last price
-If you bought 200GH/S from PBMining it would cost you 1.16BTC or $562.80

This means that you need to get the electricity for pretty cheap but the site claims they are located in Saskatchewan, Canada, where electricity prices average 10 cents per KW/h.

At that price, one ant miner costs me around $35 a month and whatever is leftover from your purchase which is more than included.  Saskatchewan is also a very large, flat and empty province, they could easily have a solar energy or wind farm.  So far the story makes sense.  Also, for a while, contracts were closed for purchase.  To me this means that they are responsible owners and not overselling their product.  Since then prices been going down.  This tells me that power costs pay for themselves.

The catch is, at the end of the 5 years, they keep the machines, you are stuck having to buy again, so you have to figure your re-investment costs accordingly.  From what I noticed, it is following the line of what it should, like the recent drop in prices means a lot less trading after the "Skittish Cats" have left the game.  My earnings dropped by about 25% since then... but my other miners also suffered this same drop because not as many transactions are done on the network itself which is how the majority of miners are paid, as a result of mining transaction fees.  I been using the earning to buy high quality PSU's for my offline mines, it also helped me getting started offline mining.

I guess it's how you look at it.  I've not yet quite made my money back but it's only been a few months and suffered a major crisis in the meantime.  I re-invest whatever pay I get in either gold or offline mining assets. If this is a ponzi, it looks a lot like actual investment mining.  The owner is probably making money from the number of investors and no quite from the mining endeavors.  I don't think they're crooks myself.  However, it depends on your living circumstances.  Some people, like in Germany, pay $0.35 per KW/H and it's $0.10 AVG in Canada.

1- If you live where electricity is below $0.15 then go offline.
2- If you live with parents, go online (You'll keep killing their power grid and piss them off lots)
3- If you want to invest secretly from spouse etc...  Go online.
4- If you live in an OLD place...  Go online.
5- If you have alternative energy sources, go offline.
6- If you're spending your life saving and none will stop you, go offline regardless.

Would I recommend it?  Sure!  I've yet to be able to prove them as a scam; which is by definition is a blatant deceitful money grab.  It does smell ponzi and the recent price drop gives it that effect so it's tough to tell if the drop is due to the past few week's speculations or the increase in difficulty.  Usually prices drops early upon joining a ponzi scheme which wants you to keep spending to keep on top of a rotator or whatever so it's too hard to tell. 

So yeah, don't spend your life savings on a website where there is no corporate backing.  PB Mining is a business, not an incorporation which to me is the "suspicious" aspect of it.  However, I would do business the exact same way because it's a good business model, you get free equipment after 5 years.  I live in Canada too so I know it's a feasible due to our modest energy costs.

Long before 5 years the machines will be worthless. Even regular computers are close to worthless after 5 years and they aren't going up the ASIC R&D curve the way bitcoin miners are.

Also, cex.io mines on ghash.io which I wouldn't choose because of the 51% issue (it is already too loarge). We want to behave in a way to keep a sustainable ecosystem for us all. This is one of the lessons we learn with cryptocurrencies and I hope that people interested in cryptocurrencies are smart enough to behave in a way which benefits not only themselves but our ecosystem too. Should be doable because cryptocurrencies require a certain amount of education, but anyway let's see....

The 5 year contract is like buying a mining rig yourself and use it till it becomes useless. It makes a greater appeal than the 1 year term which pulls you off any potential returns you might get in the second/third year depending on your contract initial mining power and its competitiveness at that time.

I'm currently on a low-end contract with cloudhashing and if I'm lucky I'll get my bitcoins back in around 9 months but I need at least 2 difficulty changes to be 5% or lower. I paid $1000 for 85 GHs for 1 year contract with them but then 2 days ago I discovered pbmining which could be a scam(certainly not a ponzi scheme) or not but surely has a decent price for 1 GH so decided to risk $250 to buy 80 Ghs from them, thats about 4 times lower than cloudhashing for only 5Ghs difference and will only need around 6 months even with difficulty change at current rate of 15-20% to get my bitcoins back. Whether the btc price will remain the same by then its a risk even the btc traders take everyday.

My advice would be to make your own calculations for any potential investment and take the risk only with money you're prepared to lose as every business has its risks, even investment banks(eg Lehman Brothers) go bankrupt so nothing is safe, therefore only invest what you can afford to lose.

Hi, here is my research

https://cex.io/
https://hashop.io/
https://cloudhashing.com/contracts
https://products.butterflylabs.com/1-gh-cloud-hosted-bitcoin-hashing-power.html
http://pbmining.com/
http://www.groupbitcoin.com/pages/prices
http://epickaxe.com/
https://mimocloud.net
https://www.bitcoinhashingcloud.com/
http://bitcoin-contract.com/
https://www.bitcoinfrenzy.com/
http://www.minerlease.com/
http://www.byteminr.com/
http://www.cryptocurrencyinc.com/
http://bitcoinmining.isapassion.com/collections/all
http://www.progressivebtcmining.com/
http://www.hexmining.com/
http://cloudhashers.com/
http://btc-cloud.de/
https://minercloud.com/
http://www.kaysid.com/
http://knightsofthesatoshi.com/

Alot of people are so skeptical about mining now. I counted my self and really you hardly make money. So what the only thing left to do is buy bitcoins instead investing in mining?

Thanks! Found a couple new places we previously didn't know about.

 500ghs. contracts  going for $5k for a year. It makes me wonder if people are actually buying.

I don't know if it is a ponzi but it is definitely scammy.

Well i kind of agree, let's say you buy 1TH/s for 10 bitcoins and if we count It should give us about 3 bitcoins a month or something but that's unrealistic you will probably buy the contract and will never pay off your investment because if you want to keep your income stable you have to add extra Hash as difficulty increases and that's endless circle..

This.

I just won 20ghs on the Easter giveaway from pb mining so well see how that does at least? I'm not convinced in customer service so I'm not investing any capital myself. The point of buisiness is to make money, why would people give away good money for a service you can do yourself. Cloud hashing seems mostly for newbs or people not willing to invest in hardware .

I did cloud mining and gpu mining. But i lost money in both. If i would have purchased the btc directly i am in profit.

How can anybody fall for this?!?!

Well, sure but not if the price per coin is $5,000 per unit, not if electricity is generated for free, which both can be possible, all at once too.  The price shoots and drops by hundreds, like Gold regularly does, this means people recognize it is worth that much compared to fiat.  Those machines became highly affordable when the price of Bitcoin tanked because many miners were getting out of the business and many nearly giving away machines; Manufacturers started to mass produce because the yhad a lot more coin to play with because of the new influx of miners, well, those that could did, since now more people could afford them.  This shot a demand through to yingyang and bolstered the in-stock market.  The price in Bitcoin Asics is not priced in dollars but in BitCoin.  The machine is only worth $200 but was once sold for multiple thousands worth of Bitcoin; set by the network.  If price of BTC doubled overnight, so would the cost for miners but you'd likely pay the same amount in BitCoin.  It would cost you more fiat to buy Bitcoin.

Everything happened at an opportune time, don't you think? 

I still own every computer I ever owned from my 1992 IBM ThinkPad and they still all do their own work in my lab; all they way up to my newest ThinkPad W530.  Just because something is obsolete, doesn't make it useless, just means you need newer machines to pick up the slack and get creative. 

Comparing with consumer computers, is not being fair because you can buy a high end computers that will be obsolete after 15 years and not just 2-3 years like with HP's, Acer and other low grade brands.  My ThinkPad T61P is still considered above average, 8 years after; but that's the same model astronauts take into outer space, not cheap stuff.

yes true once mining in cex.io or pbmining with GHS prices low and not too much benefit for us if we are not a large capital :)

but now I just choose to buy or lease mining equipment rental rigs

I think that a miming contract would be great if you could choose your own pool to mine on to prove that you have actual hardware mining for you. But of course that wouldn't work for all these scams either.

The benefit of cloud mining is avoiding all the headaches of dealing with hardware.  The downside is that you're adding another variable into your mining success.  You're relying on the mining cloud or contract to uphold their end of the bargain.  Once they have payment you really don't have any recourse.

You can make money with contracts if you can treat the miners as your own in-house eq and control the pool they mine on and the algo.  Very few mining contracts offer this.

Not bad! I used it

I've got a small contract with pbmining and they have paid out 80+% of my investment so far after just 2.5 months.  So although it's quite likely it is a ponzi, at least it's a healthy one... they never missed a Sunday payment for me. 

sorry it's actually been 3.5 months

I wish it were not a ponzi scheme, but it is the most obvious answer.

I singed a contract with the President of isapassion.com and paid 212 dollars back in 2013. I see him live and kicking, but no sign of bitcoin or refund is in the horizon.
The site is gone and so are the internet traces of the person who took my money.

Bitcoin Cloud Mining looks good on paper but hard to make it work for you on a small scale.

I tried BitcoinCloudServices. com and CloundMinr.io and for a while it looked good until the payout stopped and one guy even put his whole user list on his website claiming it got hacked. Needless to say, both are 100% scams.

Bitcoin fever is hard to resist so I now  mine alt coins and convert those to bitcoins.

Alt coins are much easier to mine (some even with cpu only) and you can cash out every day if you like. But beware, a lot of pump and dump in the alt coin world. But some of those alts are worth while keeping for the long term and make some decent money. Something that's mot possible anymore with mining bitcoins. Except if you throw tens of thousands of dollars on hardware.

PM me for a list of suggestions if you're interested.

Otherwise i have still some Cloudminr.io Accounts that i can  sell up to you  ;D so... if ure interested  :D

No for sure.. There are simply quit enough scmamers out there... everyday a new Porject...
But there are, legit Cloudmining Services ... i can give u some tipps.  ;)

regards

its hard to tell if those cloud mining sites are really mining even if they shows photos since it's easy to crop pictures nowadays. BTC exchange is quite low for a company to mine and offer cloud mining unlike before where a BTC is worth more than $300 USD.
BTC cant even stay long in the $300 USD level for a long time.

Yes, you are right. When you find BTC mining company website - you never know - it is scam or not.  :D

Every time i remember those "mining contracts" I remember cloudminr.io
I was so sure before that they will not close down because of that "mining contract" because they offer 5 tears mining contracts. But I was wrong and so does the others who invested with cloudminr.io
One giveaway on cloudminr.io is their domain name, which is registered only for 1 year, yet they are offering 5 year mining contract.

Reading this will be a good start : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=878387.0

Really useful :-)

I think that one can take the risk if the site has these conditions:

-They offer selling your GHs /KHS

-They provide reasonable withdrawal fees


Then you can invest some bits with caution (not a great amount) "mine" for some days (5-7), sell so that you get even or some small profit, and leave the rest of the profit "mining".


Now these small amount is mining "safely" as you would only lose time if that crumbles.

that thread is a very good guide for newbies and old ones who wants to dive into cloudmining investment
it would really help if those sites offering cloudmining put pictures weekly of their operations or maybe post somewhere in youtube

Cloud mining is very Risky; and in general, cloud mining contracts are nothing more than ponzi schemes.

If you want to cloud mine you should buy ghs and not mining contracts.

There are 2\3 sites that are trusted: cex and hashnest. However, for now cex.io is not a good option.

is there any thread or subforum specialized for reviewing cloud mining site, or multipool?

This thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=878387.0) is probably the closest thing that you're looking for. It's a comparison of all cloud mining websites and their risk of being a ponzi. Fair warning: most of them are ponzis, and I'd stay away from cloud mining unless you want fall victim to a scam.

thanks, bookmarked that thread

cex.io was honest it was just market for hashes.

almost all cloud mining ended as scams tho :(

So, it it actually possible to make a profit using a cloud mining service?
Possibly by mining certain altcoins, I would think?

I highly, highly doubt it. Mining at most points is incredibly not-profitable unless you're coming out with state-of-the-art hardware yourself.

I do believe it! Not every investment of mining is a Ponzi , there are many mining rigs for rent to make profit! I know the guy of Bitmain , It is the biggest manufacturer of mining rigs !!

They also do some business in cloud mining Pacmic V3:https://www.hashnest.com/l/wzepnNJ4jjg (https://www.hashnest.com/l/wzepnNJ4jjg)

However  the antiminer S5 or S5+ are good product for miners. I have U3 ,a vest-pocket mining rig of Bitmain .It works well.

SO,maybe ,we could turst one of them ,instead of to doubt everything .

A year after a lot of these ponzi schemes panned out and new ones still keep cropping up.  I guess new meat is available perpetually.

if you do not get the situation that was discovered with cex.io where their stopped their mining activity because their miners was not profitable anymore, and investors lost basically tons of money, maybe you can hope to do roi in 5 months

certainly if someone has roi already because he started this years, now he is ahead and he is making a good profit, if he start big....

There are a lot of variables.  Difficulty has been pretty good.  Price could be better.   All depends on fees really, and cost.   The legit sites you at least have a chance.

The ponzi that actually have no gear and pretend to mind is the plague on cloud mining.  Sadly there are just a lot of scams you have to be carefull.

iv been burned from PBmining , havent messed with anything else since then! iv learned my lesson!!  8)

:o PBmining Ponzi shoud be classified as a investor-base game

The entire point of bitcoin is to take the trust out of the question by putting everything on a public ledger. If they can't/won't show you the mined coins on the blockchain they are full of shit.

If someone had a machine that would mine x amount of bitcoins why would they rent it to you for an amount lower than that?

No it just makes it like most investment advice today on wall street. LOL

BTC has a predicted resistance rate of around $250-$260.  The rest is waiting on the debt currency system the world runs on to explode(or is that implode?).  This is from what I've heard more from financial types who are watching this thing like a market.  It may NOT be a bad thing if the price drops to further for a while.  Remember we've got a lot of centralization going on and home miners can just pull the plug and go to their day job.  These mass mining operations can pull the plug, but only for so long then they have to start auctioning off their assets.  If you've got a cloud mining contract your SOL at that point.

I also believe that transparency is a good thing.  Sunlight scatters the cockroaches.  Every company I've ever dealt with that was truly striving for new customers would go out of their way to be transparent as to the size of their operation.  They may not show you their P/L if they were privately held but they would have no problem throwing out audit result after audit result and picture after picture so that you know they are a legitimate business.  Especially if they think they could possibly get a few thousand out of you.

it looks hard to invest on cloud mining, when we check its history

bitcoin mining.does anyone have information about me?a decent company?or is it scam?
my mail:ocanayl@gmail.com
if you can help I'd appreciate it.

When the mining difficulty rises fast, the cloud mining company can make money by just selling the contract without adding more mining facilities.

Don't revive/necro old threads to ask a generic question. Use the search facility.