Depends on the season. I'm at about 10.3 c/kWh if you average the costs throughout the year.

I'm also looking at Hashnest because the maintenance fee is cheaper than my electricity cost. What I keep coming back to is the increase in block difficulty. It looks like a Hashnest S5 barely pays for itself before becoming obsolete, assuming the difficulty continues to increase at the same rate over the next two years.

Thanks the the replies. Maybe I'll look at buying a used miner to try this out instead of renting hash.

Hello,

I've been watching Bitcoins from the periphery for a few years and have decided to put a little skin in the game and try some mining. Unfortunately I waited far too long to use any hardware I have lying around so I began to look at ASIC miners. Before I pony up for any type of decent hardware, I want to lease a rig and make sure I understand the process and that all of my Excel sheets are approximately correct when it comes to costs of doing business vs BTC generated. When I go to lease a machine it looks like I can purchase time in the form of hashes/sec. I started with what I wanted to spend per month and then figured out how many hashes/sec I could afford based on running the machine for the entire month.

I'm curious if there are any advantages or disadvantages to renting a machine for a shorter amount of time (but running at a faster speed) compared with running a slower machine for longer. For example, if the cost to rent a 2.5 TH/s machine for 30 days is X, is there any reason I would not instead rent a 5 TH/s machine for 15 days or a 10 TH/s machine for 7.5 days, all at the same cost? The online calculators suggest my generated BTC would be identical but I'm wondering if there are factors that the calculators don't take into account. I would likely be using a PPLNS pool.

Any advice is appreciated!