Is CPU Cloud Mining worth it?

[micjamking]

That is, can CPU Cloud Mining be profitable and how much power do I need to make it profitable? Looking at hosting costs and average returns, what currencies are currently profitable when cloud mining?

I'm interested in mining, but I'm a Mac user & have no interest in burning down my GPU/CPU on a computer that I also need to work on everyday. I also like the idea of being able to setup multiple miners in the cloud & just letting them run with little to no maintenance.

Appreciate any advice.

[instacalm]

Hi micjamking,

It can definitely be very profitable if you happen to mine the right coin at the right time, specifically when a coin's difficulty is low. That of course is always a bit of a gamble given the fact that you can't know for sure whether the coin you mine is going to turn out to become popular.  The most profitable CPU coin I cloud-mined so far (for about two weeks after it was launched on 3x 8CPU instances) was Particle.  However, I don't know which coin is currently (most) profitable.

[micjamking]

That was my inclination as well; seems that cloud mining's profitability is based on timing (i.e. mining the right coin at the right time) which is more of a gamble than an investment strategy like GPU mining is.

If you don't mind me asking, what cloud service did you use? What was your costs?

[xbudahx]

I tried the following cloud services

AWS
Azure
HP Cloud
Joyent
Elastic Hosts
Rackspace
Dimension Data


Conclusion: A big waste of time

[fatnlovelyfred]

So what's the trick of knowing the right coin and time?

Where do I have to look to find out? Thanks for any tip about it.

[Starscream]

So what's the trick of knowing the right coin and time?

Where do I have to look to find out? Thanks for any tip about it.

Cloud mining is a waste of time and you won't mine with profit.

If you mine under the presumption that a certain coin will increase in value over a period of time (and thus you mine with a lose) and once it does only then you'll be profitable, than you should simply buy it.

[Mortimer452]

Amazon AWS used to offer $100 free credit to students and business owners, that was worth about 300 hours or so of cc2.8xlarge (32-core!) spot instances.  I mined a *LOT* of Primecoins for free that way.

Other than that - big risk in paying that kindof money for cloud CPU time

[rwessels]

Even if you have the hardware already, it is a risk based on power costs.  My 27 dual processor quad core servers are sitting powered off right now.  The only reason to cloud mine is if you want to take a gamble on a brand new CPU only coin before it hits an exchange.