Mining hardware or cloud mining?

[samysamy1]

Hi all,

Is it better to invest in mining hardware, like a couple of asic usb miners or invest in cloud mining such as www.cex.io. The miners are getting more and more expensive. You simply can't complete with other bidders on Ebay on a limited budget, but once you've used it you can resell it. Purchasing hashpower on cex.io is also quite expensive but I've read that you can resell this too.
Which method is more profitable on the long run and what do you use?

Sam

[opnoskatt]

If you're diligent enough to follow BTC closely and have a basic understanding of bid/ask I would recommend the cloud route, specifically a fast moving site like CEX.  I mine on CEX anywhere between 20 and 150 GHS, but most of money is actually made making trades of the GHS shares.  By following BTC closely you can stay ahead of most of the gains/losses in GHS price which makes it pretty easy to trade if you're patient.  Good luck as you get started no matter which route you go.

[kuverty]

Cex.io will pay you off if you know how to use it, know when difficulty changes and so on. You can't make profit just by mining, you have to know how to trade. But it can be profitable. For BTC mining I'd suggest cloud mining, if you order ASICs now it's pure luck. If you want to mine with hardware I'd suggest looking into altcoins and GPU mining. FPGAs/ASICs are coming for Scrypt, too but you could get your rig together in a week.

[samysamy1]

Thank you for recommending cloud mining. Is there another than cex.io which you can use for other altcoins?

[r0bd0b]

For CPU-mined altcoins such as Quark, Primecoin and Protoshares you can often roll your own cloud mining solution by setting up Microsoft Azure or Amazon EC2 cloud instances, and running miners in them. I've had some success with this mining Quark when the difficulty was still low.

You can sign up for a trial with Azure, which will give you 30 days to use $200 of free credit. You can set up Windows or Linux instances and mine until you run out of credit, and any earned coins will have cost you nothing. You have to use a credit/debit card to sign up for the trial, but they don't charge you at the end of the trial. I've done two trials like this, and a friend has done over ten with the same credit card. They call once, a few days after the trial ends, and all you have to do is say you aren't interested or were testing it for "possible use in the future" and that's that.

If you're interested in trying CPU mining on an Azure or Amazon instance let me know and I'll be happy to give you as much info as I can!