Can someone with the knowledge explain how to solo mine or where to download the tools?

On a different note, I believe delarey is legit, although I don't understand why he feels obliged to compensate for orphaned blocks.

How do you know it's a vietnamese pool and not nicehash?  Currently, is seems that the hashrate is back to 22GH/s.

5 free coins, newplato

Regarding your question my current understanding is
1)  Yes, it is written in FAQ.  This can change at any time as it happened in hashflare.
2)  I highly doubt it, but you never know.
3)  I don't think you can cancel any contracts.
4)  The maintenance fee is shown to you when you buy hashrate.
5)  No idea.  They make the rules.

From what I see from your statistics, your ROI should be much more than one year, possibly around two.  

In my opinion, minergate contracts are on the verge of a scam.  I have bought five small BTC contracts and I have noticed that the profit does not depend on the hashrate, but rather it is fixed such that you get ROI in exactly 365 days given fixed difficulty.  Since difficulty changes, your profit decreases every day, so, in the end I don't know if you ever get your investment back.  Notice that minergate only saves your daily profit in dollars, not BTC, which is misleading.

I have posted my observations here
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2511076

Since you have older contracts, can you either confirm or disprove my claims?  Also, how has your daily profit in BTC has changed over time?  Does it follow the mining difficulty, or it follows an internal minergate algorithm that fixes ROI for all contracts to a fixed time?

Dear pixie85,

thank you for your comment.  First off please refrain from calling people names so quickly or posting generic comments.

I have spent quite some non trivial time on researching a particular aspect of a particular company and I'm offering to the community my results, because I find them interesting.  Please, spend some time and carefully read my post.  After spending time in minergate's chat I realized that people there are not aware of this particular aspect of their contracts and I hope my post will shed some light.

The central topic of my post is not to call somebody or something a scam, or ask for help about unanswered tickets, but rather mathematically show a very interesting phenomenon in minergate's contracts, which I haven't seen discussed somewhere else.  I would be glad to hear back from you if you have anything interesting to comment.

Best regards.

Minergate cloud contracts are on the verge of a scam.  So far I have bought seven contracts from them and I have just put out a topic where I describe my experience with them.  Take a look and feel free to comment.  Here is the link

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2511076.0

Hello ahmaddanyal06 and thank you for being my first comment.

Minergate has two profitability calculators for BTC, one for pool mining and another one for cloud mining.

I calculated that 24 TH/s give you profit $410 per week in pool mining and $70 per week in cloud mining.  This is because for cloud mining you have to pay the maintenance fee, but even that does not explain the factor of 6 in difference.  So, I suspect they keep a lot of your profit for themselves.  As a matter of comparison, currently the profit is twice the maintenance.  So, in ideal conditions, with 24 TH/s you should have made $270 per week, but they only pay you $70.

Another important point is that ROI is one year, but given the difficulty does not change.  For comparison, I mention that in one year the difficulty of BTC went up by an order of magnitude, around ten times.

I think the suspicion here is that your profit does not depend on your H/s, but on how many BTC you paid for the contract.  What I'm afraid is that they will keep reducing the profit every day, so that in the end ROI will be very difficult to reach.

I have raised my concerns to minergate, I will update if and when they reply, although from past experience, they might never do so.

Let me know if you want to discuss anything further.

Best regards.

Hello all.

In the course of the last month I purchased five small BTC contracts in minergate and two in XMR.  After observing inconsistencies in my profits I started investigating a bit deeper and I came to the conclusion that minergate's practices are at least suspicious.

Here is a table of my contracts

On 11 Nov 2017  I bought 275 GH/s I paid 0.00588500  BTC with average profit   0.00001617 BTC/day  or 5.88 satoshi/GH
On 14 Nov 2017  I bought   60 GH/s I paid 0.00134760  BTC with average profit   0.00000369 BTC/day  or 6.15 satoshi/GH
On 18 Nov 2017  I bought   60 GH/s I paid 0.00110520  BTC with average profit   0.00000302 BTC/day  or 5.03 satoshi/GH
On 26 Nov 2017  I bought 140 GH/s I paid 0.00233660  BTC with average profit   0.00000642 BTC/day  or 4.59 satoshi/GH
On   2 Dec 2017  I bought   80 GH/s I paid 0.00117360  BTC with average profit   0.00000322 BTC/day  or 4.03 satoshi/GH

As we can see from the above table the profit per GH is pretty inconsistent and can differ by up to 53%.  I find it hard to believe that this is due to factors like luck of the pool.  Minergate claims that collaborates with hashing24 and that they offer real mining contracts.

The suspicious part here is that for all five contracts the amount of BTC paid divided by the average BTC gained per day is the same and exactly 365 days.  This means that the profit you get is fixed by the amount of BTC you paid and not by the amount of hashing power you purchased.  Assuming constant difficulty, ROI is fixed to one year at the time of purchase.

From minergate's part there is no information to be found regarding these practices.  I have raised a support ticket asking for clarifications, although from past experience with them I have little hope I will get any answer at all.

Let's also mention that my two XMR contracts follow exactly the same pattern, ROI in one year assuming no change in difficulty.

Conclusions     In minergate you don't get paid proportionally to the hashing power you buy, but rather your profit if fixed by the amount of BTC spent.  These practices are at least suspicious and instead of mining it feels like you lend money to them.  Since the difficulty of BTC changes it remains to be seen whether you ever get your investment back.

Open questions   Since my contracts are relatively new I would like to know what happens when the mining difficulty changes.  Any of you with older contracts can share your experience and tell us how profit changes with time? What is your ROI time?  By ROI time I mean the time you need to get your satoshi back, not the time to get your dollars back.  This is a common misconception I encountered in minergate chat, which misconception is supported by the fact that minergate claims ROI in 120 days and they only save your daily profit in dollars instead of BTC.