Has a BTC cloud mining service EVER been more +EV than BTC over 2 years?

[FandangledGizmo]

Question 1: To your knowledge has a Bitcoin cloud mining contract (or service that switches between contracts) ever been more profitable than just buying Bitcoin over a 24 month time frame in the last 4 years?

Question 2: In your opinion what percentage of cloud mining contracts or service providers are scams/ponzi schemes?

Background: I would not cloud mine myself, but there are currently a few salesman going around to friends and family offering them virtually guaranteed 5-15% a month returns for cloud mining contracts starting from a few dollars. (I am also aware the salesman gets a circa 10% commission in the process.) I am pretty certain this would never be more profitable than just buying BTC but to people who are new to BTC and easily bamboozled by exciting numbers over a short period I thought the easiest way would be to show that there is no/low examples of a cloud mining service/contract offerer outperforming BTC over a long period.

Thanks in advance & for any other input you can give on the subject.

[QuintLeo]

One of the PACMIC contracts from Bitmain (PACMIC 3 I think it was) was more profitable than buy-and-hold on Bitcoin, since it payed off in Bitcoin.

I am not aware of any others offhand, though I've not looked closely at most of them.


 Keep in mind that even REPUTABLE cloud mining is probably going to make more for the cloud folks than for you, otherwise they wouldn't be offering the stuff as a cloud service and would just mine for themselves with it instead.
 This does NOT make them a scam, as long as they provide what they claim they do and live up to their stated terms - it MIGHT make them a rip-off though if the terms are TOO favorable to themselves.

[mindrust]

Question 1: To your knowledge has a Bitcoin cloud mining contract (or service that switches between contracts) ever been more profitable than just buying Bitcoin over a 24 month time frame in the last 4 years?

No there wasn't any. None last to this day at least. Maybe there was a CM service which was paying without problems but that was true till it ain't. 

Question 2: In your opinion what percentage of cloud mining contracts or service providers are scams/ponzi schemes?

%100 every single one of them. Every but every cloud mining service there is offers a reference program. Means get more customers to me, earn more = Ponzi. You'll soon realize you make your money only from your refs but not your actual mining contract = ponzi.

Cloud mining = ponzi.

If it were profitable, they wouldn't share it with random people.
You wouldn't.
I wouldn't.
They don't.

[zikabra]

Cloud mining is not profitable and most cloud mining "companies" are just ponzi schemes.
If they are not ponzi then they are using your money to expand their farms and you will probably get in return what you invested after year or two, or maybe you won't reach ROI because difficulty is raising all the time.

Here is my theory - you are loaning them money, and they pay you back every day some small interest which they are calling cloud mining 

[FandangledGizmo]

Thanks for the replies guys. I managed to convince them not to 'invest' in cloud mining . Thank goodness.