TLDR; I bought 20 TH/s from Hashflare and I'm going to post here what happens.



FULL BLOG BELOW

Maybe there are other people out there like me. You see bitcoin jumping to $11,000 and you hear people say bitcoin may go to $100,000 in a few years. You get excited and you decide to join the craze. Sure, on the one hand, you think it's a bubble, but on the other hand, what if it's not? Maybe you think this is Google at $250 or Netflix at $100. In those stocks you missed the initial gains but there was still a long way to go.

After getting excited and reading a little, you decide to try mining. Of course, you quickly discover that every piece of mining equipment is selling at 3-4 times the listed price. The equipment manufacturers themselves are sold out and booking orders for delivery 2-3 months out. On top of that, you keep reading that difficulty increases mean the miners earn less and less over time. You read what happened to Dash when the D3 hit the market and decide you better get in right now. So, you look into cloud mining.

Immediately, you notice a dichotomy in opinion on cloud mining. Some say all cloud mining is a scam and others say they have made money in cloud mining. A few companies are generally held out as being legitimate. These include Genesis Mining and Hashflare.  Genesis is no longer taking new bitcoin contracts. Hashflare is. Probably because there are a lot of angry people that they cut contracts from lifetime to 1-year. Ironically, the fact they did this kind of makes me think they are legitimate. I mean, if a scam why not just disappear with the money? And why would major credit card companies still allow you to send them money? It's confusing. What is real and what is not?

To answer the above question, I decided to purchase 20 TH/s from Hashflare. Why 20TH/s? Hashflare currently has a policy to only let you transfer BTC0.1 at a time. At the current mining difficulty, 20 TH/s should mine about BTC0.1 per month. So, I should be able to transfer monthly from Hashflare to my wallet. I will not reinvest. I will cash out each month and see if they let me.

After purchasing my 20 TH/s, the first troubling thing I notice is the following statement at the top of the login page:
 "Bitcoin withdrawals continue to be performed with a delay. The withdrawals that are confirmed on HashFlare.io are broadcasted to the network by block.io and are placed in the Mempool queue. This means these transactions now await confirmations by the miners.  
  You can track your transactions here: https://chain.so/. If your transaction exists in chain.so it means it is already in the queue. HashFlare support is unable to speed it up since its out of our control.
   As soon as the queue of outgoing transactions is completely cleared, this message will be removed."

Bitcoin transactions should take minutes not days. Some research reveals Hashflare pays the transaction fee themselves, so they are paying the absolute minimum fee. This is weird. Why not just charge the transaction fee to the contract holders? Sadly, the only reason I can think to do this is if there is no mining. This makes sense if the whole thing is a ponzi scheme and they need new blood to pay the old blood but new blood is not coming in. $H!t! What have I gotten into? Is it too late to get me money back? Is that why Hashflare freezes your account for two weeks if you fund with a credit card? I'm starting to freak out. Ok, deep breath. I brought my TH/s using a credit card, so if need be I can dispute the charges (hopefully). Let's give them a few days and let's see if my 20 TH/s starts producing BTC0.003/day.

I'm just getting started in bitcoin mining. I wanted to buy a couple Antminer S9's, but those things are selling like $4000 on ebay. Even the January ones are going for over $3000. On top of that, I can't find anyplace reputable to host my miner because my house would never support multiple Antminer's running. I plan on buying 4 direct from Bitmain. But, even doing that is difficult since I have to deposit money in coinbase (which requires time to clear), then exchange bitcoin for bitcoin cash. Then buy. I'm in the middle of that process now and hope that by the time I get my miners one of the hosting places will have some space. I spoke to Gigawatt and they say they may have space come February.

In the meantime, I decided to try some cloud mining. I know, everything says cloud mining isn't profitable. But, with the runup in bitcoin, as long as it stays over $3K I think you will at least break even. Which probably explains why you can't buy any SHA-256 hashing right now. Only place that still sells is hashflare. Now, I understand there is a lot of anger over slashing their contracts to 1-year, but, I've also seen a lot saying they are a legit business. So, I brought an S9 equivalent 13.5 TH/s from them. I figure at current rates, that basically pays for itself in the two months I'll have to wait to get my S9's from Bitmain.

So, I have three questions:
1) Does anyone know reputable hosting companies that have space available? (Is Gigawatt reputable?)

2) Is Hashflare legit (aka am I stupid to buy more TH/s from them)?

3) What combination of pools should I use on hashflare?