Leasing a miner -- speed vs time?

[haeriphos]

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!

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[quakefiend420]

Difficulty increases.  You're probably better off to rent more hashrate for a shorter amount of time rather than less for longer as diff will continue to increase over time, earning you less coins...

Realistically, your best bet is to buy coins.  No one is going to lease you hashrate for less than they can mine with it themselves, it makes no sense.

[alh]

I have to agree with quakefiend420 here. What you might be able to find are some "pricing anomalies" (i.e. a mistake) on nicehash (or westhash) in terms of leasing hash rate. Double check too that the nicehash rate probably has 3-4% added on for nicehash itself, and not the actual harcware owner.

You won't get rich, but you can try out your method if you want.

[quakefiend420]

Just to add to what I said earlier, if you're renting Scrypt or X11 or something that has more of an altcoin community, sometimes renting makes sense to jump on a new coin or to speculate on an existing one, but when it comes to SHA256 BTC is king, which means that no one is going to lease it for less than they can make mining directly.

[haeriphos]

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

[philipma1957]

What is your power cost? you need to be under 10 cents to stand any chance at all if you run the miners at  your home.

[haeriphos]

What is your power cost? you need to be under 10 cents to stand any chance at all if you run the miners at  your home.

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.