Cloud Mining Journey (with Hashflare)

[rubyrain]

Hi, I just registered to reply to this thread I introduced my bro to hash flare just yesterday, and he was freaking out, and found this thread. And after reading it (btw, it's very thorough and very well written), I wanted to testify with my exp. in addition to mghaynes's journey.

TL;DR - I transferred about 0.05 BTC so far to my other wallet, and got return of investment in about 3 month (maybe little less).

I had similar question in August. I had a co-worker who already had contract with genesis-mining, and that he was getting payout so it was legit. I wanted to buy a contract with them, that was when BTC was rising around 4~5k, but I couldn't use my credit card (all my credit cards were declined). When I got enough BTC from coinbase, there was no BTC contract available anymore. So I looked for alternative, found hashflare. But like mghaynes, I had concerns about hashflare being scam. So I decided to test it myself, spent $360 to get 3TH using credit card.

I transferred about 0.05 BTC so far to my other wallet, reinvested about 0.02BTC since then. I still have 0.05 BTC in my wallet, so that's more than return of my investment. This is mainly due to steep rise of BTC price, but I remember making same conclusion as mghaynes in September. If the BTC price stays the same, you get your return of investment roughly in 3 months. Every mined coin after that is pure profit.

What I want to say is, even if this is 1 year contract, unless BTC price drops significantly, cloud mining is still profitable.

My brother and I wanted to buy S9 like last week / early this week, but it's sold out. Not sure when they're gonna announce next batch, but like mghaynes said, it'll arrive at your door after 3 month from you order (that is if you order right away when batch is out). Then you need to mine with it for few months to get the return of investment. So I think cloud mining is not that bad. With no s9 stock left on bitmain at this point, I'm thinking about investing more into hashflare.

I'm little nervous about renewal after reading whole threads, haha, I'll watch this thread and see if it gets renewed.

Thanks.

BTW, @mghaynes, thx for good write up and analysis. Also you should put your referral link on your blog. I got some BTC from that when someone used that link to register and bought hash power. (my bro didn't.. boo) Here's mine https://hashflare.io/r/5DEF5A51

[1714817250]

1714817250

[daweller]

Hashflare is down.
That's it, they have run off to Bermuda with our Bitcoins

[pinkflower]

This makes sense if the whole thing is a ponzi scheme and they need new blood to pay the old blood but new blood is not coming in. $H!t! What have I gotten into?

If you start considering BTC's rising difficulty, your mining contract will gain profit less and less if you dont reinvest the profits. Having said that your ROI will take longer than you expected, while the miners are happily hedging their risk by using their customers deposits to buy new mining equipment and to pay for, in your words, the old blood.

[mghaynes]

TL;DR - Hashflare website is down. They have taken all our money.

DAY 4

It's about time to check my cloud mining results for the day. But, first I think I'll see if there are any new comments on the blog. There's an interesting comment/post from @rubyrain about his experience. The post mentions I should use a referral code to get some bitcoins credit if people sign up using the link. TBH, I won't use it since I want the blog to be as unbiased as possible. But, I also hadn't paid attention to the referral program when I signed up. So, sometime around 0300 UTC, I go log into the Hashflare site to check the referral program. Sure enough, there is a referral code and link you give out. There are also some referral materials. I click on the link to see the referral materials and suddenly I'm looking at a 502 Gateway error.
https://i.imgur.com/fGimYcr.png
I try and refresh the page several times, but honestly, I instantly know what's happened. My worse fears have been realized - Hashflare is gone. I think I'm going to throw up. Hashflare is just gone. 502 error can mean a lot of things, but instinctively, I know it means they have taken down the website. I hope I'm wrong. I hope I'll wake up in the morning and discover it was some kind of maintenance. I know I won't. I guess the question that started this journey has been answered -- Hashflare was a big scam.

[grossiwm]

At this time hashflare.io is out of service.

[traderethereum]

you can hope that this is just temporary and hashflare need time to renew their domain names. but did you compare between hashflare, hashnest, and genesis mining? I guess from this three site, you can find which is good cloud mining so you can avoid this. but its already happen and you need to learn from this. the important lesson in this situations is you can learn to not put your big money to one company especially in cloud mining.

[pippen88]

Hey everyone

I want to add to the OP, testing of hashflare

So started it a few days back myself. I had started with a small amount of 30$. Got around .21TH. Not a big deal
But i wanted to experince the whole feel of cloud mining. After watched videos of people putting in huge amount of money into bitconnect,hashflare,genisis(im leaving this out of the topic because its almost impossible to get a new contract there now)

So like OP had posted it took well over 24 hours for the first payout to happen. It was a mere .45$. And since i had not put in a huge amount i had set it automatically to reinvest.

So it started of by showing me the following amounts. By putting 30$ i would get a pay back of 157$ with out reinvesting. But i have let it reinvest everyday so far for the last 4-5 days

Now its showing my the following https://imgur.com/a/3F8lP

So by reinvesting my daily payouts for the last 4 days ( would give you the exact amount buy HF seems to be down/maintenance/slow ) I have been bumped up from 157$ on the yearly payout to $204 thats $47 increase in just 5 days?  It makes me think on how LEGIT this is. I would love to invest in an antminer or two. But i live in INDIA where its hot as heck all year around. Along with as per my calculations ill be paying around .11$ per KWA. I have to do the math and see if the miner will even pay for itself. Shall get to that working within the day or so.

[cosmicnet]

TL;DR - Hashflare website is down. They have taken all our money.

... -- Hashflare was a big scam.

The site appears to be up again. Nicehash was taken out yesterday, maybe this is related?

[mghaynes]

TL;DR - Hashflare is back up. They didn't still our money. I made BTC0.0033 yesterday.
https://i.imgur.com/gPD1PDU.jpg

DAY 4 UPDATE

Well, that was embarrassing. I made a complete fool of myself flipping out when the Hashflare site went down. In case you missed it, I posted that Hashflare was a big scam and they stole all our money. I went to sleep angry and had a restless night. How could I be so foolish as to ignore all the warning signs? Lots of people were saying cloud mining is a scam but I bought into it hook, line, and sinker. These thoughts are running through my mind all night. I'm waking up every hour, looking at the ceiling, thoughts running through my mind. It's a long night. When I get up, bleary eyed and dreading going to work tired, I call my credit card company. I'm going to see if there is anyway they can reverse the charges since I bought into a scam. After going through the normal dance of navigating the computer voice menus, I finally get a person on the phone. I'm talking to the customer service representative and explaining what happened and the site isn't even there anymore. She sympathizes with me and then drops a bombshell.
"Sir, the site is called hashflare.io?"
"Yes," I respond
"Sir, I am able to get to the site. Can you try it again?"

I was so distraught I hadn't tried to go to the site since last night. I go to the Hashflare site on my computer and sure enough the site comes up. I login and there is a message that the site was down for maintenance and some of the payments may be processed late. Ok I think. At least the site is there. But, I'm still in a negative mood and I assume "late" payment means never. Of course, that thought is quickly wiped out as I scan down and see my balance is 0.006 BTC. Looking at the history I see I mined 0.0033 BTC yesterday less the maintenance fee of 0.0005 BTC.
"Sir, are you there?" The representatives voice brings me back to reality. I quickly apologize for my drama and get off the phone.

Could Hashflare actually have been down for maintenance? I have to assume so. Certainly it's bad business practice not to warn customers you will be down for maintenance, especially when more than half the mining community thinks you are a scam. But Hashflare is not exactly a fortune 500 company. Can we really expect the best business practices? It's still too early to tell, but so far, Hashflare seems legit. Don't get me wrong there are lots of troubling signs. For example, how are they able to sell seemingly unlimited TH/s when literally every other company is sold out and you can't even buy a decent miner for less than 3 times the book price? It would be nice if they stated how many petahashes they had available for rent like eobot does. Still, to date, my every worry has turned out to be unfounded.

[mghaynes]

did you compare between hashflare, hashnest, and genesis mining? I guess from this three site, you can find which is good cloud mining so you can avoid this. but its already happen and you need to learn from this. the important lesson in this situations is you can learn to not put your big money to one company especially in cloud mining.

I did check the companies most often touted as legitimate. As of December 4, 2019, here is what I found:
- Genesis Mining - from research this is the company I would have preferred to work with. However they are not selling any TH/s.
- Hashnest - has been bought by Bitmain. The site is pretty byzantine. After clicking a bunch of stuff, near as I can tell, you cannot buy an TH/s.
- Eobot - requires 5 year contracts and charges ridiculous rates. They are charging $36000 for the equivalent hashing power of one Antminer s9!

[elijahmurray]

Thanks OP for chronicling this! I recently bought a little from hashflare and after 2 days, have bought a bit more. I'll be following your journey! Thanks for the clearly written updates.

[mghaynes]

• Yesterday's mining results - BTC0.003
• Maintenance and electricity fee - BTC0.0004
• Daily Profit - BTC0.0026
• Total profit so far - BTC0.0088
• Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/dLUeHIw.jpg

DAY 5
Another day, another BTC0.0026. No Hashflare drama in the last 24-hours. The BTC yield per day is going down, but each day I check with cryptocompare and the results basically are in line. So, looks like we are seeing the effects of new TH/s coming on line. Profit per TH/s declines daily. I suppose it's economics at work. If Dash is any example, profit per TH/s will continue to decline until it's no longer cost effective to make new machines. D3's that were selling for over $2600 a few months ago can be found on Ebay for less than $1000 now, and you don't see any manufacturer's rushing out new machines. Depending on electricity costs, it will take about a year to get ROI on a D3 at $1000 given current Dash prices. I suspect SHA-256 will go the same route with people selling S9s for under $1000 at some point in the future.

[mghaynes]

• Yesterday's mining results - BTC0.003
• Maintenance and electricity fee - BTC0.0004
• Daily Profit - BTC0.0026
• Total profit so far - BTC0.0115
• Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/GgQceRM.png

DAY 6
I made BTC0.0026 yesterday, about the same as the day before. I now have BTC0.0115 which, ironically, is exactly the minimum withdrawal amount. Oh yeah, Hashflare just updated their policy. They have increase the minimum withdrawal to 0.0115 with a transaction fee of 0.0015. I believe this is more than double their previous transaction fee which was 0.0006. They were having lots of complaints about transactions, so looks like they raised the fee in response to try and get the transactions to go through faster. I'd love to test it out, but I have to wait another week before I can withdraw from the account. I purchased my TH/s with a credit card and they put a 2-week hold on withdrawals from accounts with credit card purchases. So, we'll see how that goes in two weeks. Overall, the contract has performed as expected. However, there are two key hurdles Hashflare must pass to gain more of my trust. 1) They need to renew their domain name which is still set to expire on December 15. 2) I need a successful withdrawal from the account to my wallet, which I should be able to do in 8 more days.

[Doug E. Dee]

Hi mg,
Jeez, that withdrawal fee seems pretty high. I suppose that encourages reinvestment rather than withdrawals?

[mendeco]

Hi mg,
Jeez, that withdrawal fee seems pretty high. I suppose that encourages reinvestment rather than withdrawals?

Actually, right now, due to the high increase in bitcoin transactions they posted a small change in their withdrawal conditions.
They seem to me pretty fair:

Dear users,
Due to the high load on the Bitcoin network and number of unconfirmed transactions we are changing the commission to 0.0007 BTC to reduce the time for withdrawal transactions to be confirmed. This means that the minimum balance to make a withdrawal is now 0.0107 BTC. This is a measure to increase the speed and stability of BTC withdrawals.

We would like to remind you that HashFlare is unable to speed up the transactions in the blockchain. Lower commission transactions may take multiple days to be confirmed, since they have a lower priority from the perspective of the miners. Transactions with higher commissions are selected by the miners faster to be processed.

Thank you for understanding!

As you all can see, the minimal withdrawal amount is not 0.1 BTC but 0.01 BTC.

[Venkman83]

Hashflare domain is about to expire.
Is that normal procedure that the domain license is not updated yet?

https://www.whois.com/whois/hashflare.io

[muscles8257]

yes i am also worried about there domain expiry this friday i checked genesis mining and they originally has the same term of 3 years on there domain but have already renewed theres so don't know what the situation here is ............i hope they are not going to run with all our money

[mghaynes]

• Yesterday's mining results - BTC0.0032
• Total profit so far - BTC0.0167
• Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/8Iof7uY.jpg

DAY 7
I forgot to post yesterday. Hey, I got busy. I have a life. Even today's post is rushed as I have people yelling at me that we need to go. Anyway, the bitcoin mining has stabilized and is consistently around 0.3 mined per day less maintenance fee. The results continue to be inline with calculations from other sites as to mining expectations given 20.25 TH/s. I also decided to go 100% with Slush mining pool. To make a long story short, they have the best rates and fees. They are small, but I figure I'd get a bigger share of the bit coins they do mine.

So, we are 4 days away from the big hurdle - will Hashflare renew the domain name or not? That is the latest thing to worry me, fortunately I don't have much time to ponder as I must go now.

[cosmicnet]

yes i am also worried about there domain expiry this friday i checked genesis mining and they originally has the same term of 3 years on there domain but have already renewed theres so don't know what the situation here is ............i hope they are not going to run with all our money

It is totally beyond me why they are leaving this until the last minute. I checked with their registrar, they will have got invoiced 10 days before expiry, i.e. last week.

Letting FUD spread for the sake on paying $10 later makes no sense.

[daweller]

This domain thing, to me, is a bad sign.
it takes less than $100 to register a domain for 10 years.
Why would a company who is in any way serious, not going to renew a domain for more than a couple years at a time? ( unless they anticipate exiting after a set period )