Is it possible to cloud mine and make profit right now? ETH is 180$ right now and im gonna be using hashflare because it cost 2.2$ per 100kh. I put it into a calculator and because im gonna invest 220$ it will be 10mh. i will be making around 60$ a month. The contract is 1 year so i will make everything back in 4 months. Im new to mining so if im not correct pls tell me.
The problem with those calculators is they do not take into account the future total network hash-rate and difficulty for the coin you are mining. So if it says you will make $60/mo at this point in time, by next month it may be down to $30/mo, then $15/mo and $7.5/mo etc. The difficulty is not a static number and will fluctuate with the coins price as more miners on-board and join the mining train for the "free" money. As long as a coins price continues to increase, this can keep mining profitable, but should we get a severe and prolonged correction, say ETH drops to sub $50 for several months, the difficulty is much more slower to come down and sometimes these cloud mining contracts do not even manage to break-even.
In the end you are essentially speculating on the continued price appreciation of Ethereum, so in that respect you might be better off just buying and holding the coins than get stuck in a mining contract. These same challenges exist even for people who physically own mining hardware, however they always have the option of turning them off and selling the hardware, whereas a mining contract is fixed and you are locked in for the duration. Also some cloud mining providers have a stipulation that once the coin in no longer breaking even, meaning you are not making more than the expenses to run (which can be arbitrarily inflated to suit their needs) they can cancel the contract without any further obligation to you.
Again, imho if you are investing you would be better off waiting for a dip (which we have right now) and purchasing the coins directly as it would have a much greater chance of success than purchasing a mining contract. If you need more convincing just go over to the Zcash forums and look at all the people who got trapped in contracts and will never see their investment back, they will be lucky in some cases to get even 10% of their investments back. There may be a few instances where some lucky timing of events a few people somewhere made money off buying a mining contract, but in most cases they only work out well for the cloud provider and not the investor.
