Mining Contracts - Legit or Bogus? A Brief Analysis

[energico]

So I've been looking into mining and it looks like (for me at least) mining contracts are more appealing than setting up a rig. However, I have some serious concerns. For example, pretty much none of the companies offering mining contracts are actually mining yet, so there's no guarantee that these "mining companies" aren't just some random fat kid in Australia soliciting unguaranteed funds. The other problem is that, even if these companies ARE legit, they won't start mining for a couple of months, at which point mining will be SIGNIFICANTLY more difficult. Thus, estimated "returns" and "profits" are highly skewed.

Here are some comparisons of 1-year mining contracts:

Bitcoinfrenzy: 2 GH/s mining power @ $99, roughly 5 BTC revenue
Cloudhashing: 2 GH/s mining power @ "under $150", roughly 2.6-5.2 BTC revenue
Minerlease: 2x (1 GH/s mining power) @ $250, roughly 10.8 BTC revenue

All of these contracts provide the same hashing power, but the revenue estimates vary greatly (WTF!) from 2.6 BTC all the way up to 10.8 BTC in one year!

So how does one judge these estimates? First of all, I ran some calculations on multiple common bitcoin profitability estimators.

Some of the calculators did not factor in the steady increase in difficulty, and those calculators all gave me the same yearly Bitcoin (revenue) estimate of 9.8 BTC. The ones that did incorporate some factor of increased difficulty give (revenue) estimates of roughly 2-5 BTC.

What does this mean?

1. Don't trust Minerlease!!! You will not get 10 BTC in a year from 2 GH/s of mining power. Even if you did, you could get the EXACT SAME CONTRACT for less than half the price at Bitcoinfrenzy.
2. Bitcoinfrenzy and Minerlease both take 7.5% off every (weekly) contract payment and Cloudhashing takes 10%. Thus, you won't even be getting the full revenue amount.
3. Since these estimates are all based on calculations done with today's difficulty, which is much lower than the difficulty that will exist when these mining companies actually start, these estimates are very inflated. Thus, your revenue will again be much lower.

These mining contracts seem very sketchy and at best just barely profitable (like most mining is anyways). Also there's no guarantee that these companies are even going to mine (or pay you back!). In fact, they could literally just be Ponzi schemes, especially since they only pay out small amounts each week.

The only benefit of mining contracts is that you don't have to worry about dealing with hardware physically. You DO still have to worry about uptime, hardware failure, difficulty increases, etc. because you only make what your (virtual) miner does!

One final word of caution is that most mining companies have clauses in their TOS that allow them to cancel their business (for various reasons, and in some cases, any reason at all) and owe you NOTHING. It's important to understand that if you invest in a mining company you are basically throwing your money down a well and hoping something spits money back up at you. This is different from mining with a rig because, fail or succeed, you can always sell the rig itself for some return.

[DannyHamilton]

I get the impression that, while there may be a few legitimate mining contracts, the vast majority of mining contracts appear to be thinly veiled Ponzi Schemes.  I'd be extremely wary of any promises that any mining contract makes.  The future value of any given hash power is extremely difficult (nearly impossible) to predict with any accuracy.

[Birdy]

An even briefer analysis:
Take a look at this chart: http://bitcoindifficulty.com/
This upside down is the mining revenue (+a good chunk of risk that the mining contract is a scam).
Conclusion: Just buy the Bitcoins instead of mining them.

[swarog]

What benefit does this have over mining yourself.  Aside from power consumption?

[goxed]

Take a look at https://picostocks.com/stocks/view/19

This 100TH mine is built with bitfury ASICS.

[energico]

What benefit does this have over mining yourself.  Aside from power consumption?

The main benefit (as I mentioned) is that you don't have to do anything physically. You don't have to obtain rigs, set them up, plug them in, get them running, keep them running, make sure they are working, etc.

Otherwise you still have the same worries as a typical miner.

[cryptasm]

Some of the mining contracts on Ebay are obscene. Some people are paying the equivalent of $50 for a weekly contract that only returns about $2.5 worth of BTC.

[Jack London]

Some of the mining contracts on Ebay are obscene. Some people are paying the equivalent of $50 for a weekly contract that only returns about $2.5 worth of BTC.

I was glancing though one mining services provider: Bit-Mining.co (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=351935.0). Their Platinum Pack promises 20GH/s for 1.06 BTC (with today's prices roughly 716,35 €). They provide a 4 years warranty for the hardware, but they do not state clearly whether the payment is for the whole period (4 years) or just one single year. If it means an annual payment of 1,06 BTC, it'd be  27,03% of the expected annual income. On top of that, of course, their 8% fee from the 1st year. This is where I stop following, though... How come there can be percentual fee from the first year, if there are no income realized before the whole block has been solved?

The block time according to Bitcoin Mining Calculator (http://bitcoin.web-share.nl/), which takes into account the current difficulty level (908350862.43702  : 1), gives an estimate of 6 years, 2 months, 5 days, 10 hours, 13 minutes, 16 seconds/block. This equals to 3,923 BTC estimated cumulative profit annually. Numerous other mining calculators give similiar results (http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/; http://tpbitcalc.appspot.com/ etc.). In order to "redeem the prize", one has to manage to solve the entire block, right? I mean, there are no are no 34% or 90% ready blocks etc. Please correct me if I'm wrong...

It made my alarm bells to ring when I read that this one peculiar mining services provider, Minerlease.com (http://www.minerlease.com/contracts/half/) is advertising mining contracts that promise "30 BTC return for 1 YEAR CONTRACT (25 GH/s)". Sounds too good to be true, huh? Especially when you take into account that the estimated block time for 25 GH/s is around 4 years, 11 months, 1 week, 3 days, 10 hours, 16 minutes, 34 seconds/block. ... oh, and the contract is set to begin in April 2014, the time by which the difficulty level sure has gone drastically up from the current one (indeed, yesterday the difficulty level was still at 707408283.0515  : 1;  today it reached already 908350862.43702 : 1). Their charge is 500 US dollars.

Anyway, I sent them an inquiry conserning this major disporoportion between their estimates and the ones that numerous calculators provide. Suprise, suprise... for a week now, no answer. As far as I am concerned, this peculiar service provider, Minerlease.com seems highly untrustworthy to me.

However, I have some serious concerns. For example, pretty much none of the companies offering mining contracts are actually mining yet, so there's no guarantee that these "mining companies" aren't just some random fat kid in Australia soliciting unguaranteed funds.

Hehe, I thought of the exact same thing. However, I'd be more concerned that the fat kid is actually slovakian though... xD Anyway, even if this fat kid would be doing his mining job conscientiously, as a highly unregulated business, how can you make sure that he doesn't just keep the prize to himself and use you solely to pay for his hardware equipment?

At the moment, I am looking into this provider that is selling stocks from each set of hardware it purchases. You can see some of them here: http://www.bit-miner.com/?page=pricing. They offer certain assets where you can buy shares from. E.g. 650 GH/s divided into 5000 shares; you will be granted with GH/s per share, according which you get paid to. What's suspicious again, though, is that they don't even report their share prices, which actually makes any further calculations impossible! They don't have any shares at the moment, but will have some new in the next few days (I emailed them).

However, I wouldn't trust this one either: prices are all obsecure and there is no guarantees that if they ever make any profits, they won't just hold those to themselves instead of sharing those among the stock holders (who are actually not stock holders, but who buy a right to the dividends)...

[cunixion]

If mining contractors would mine more than what they charge, why do they choose to rent their equipment ?

whether your motivation is to get BTC or to learn the technology renting mining gear is the less appealing option.

[piethein232]

Minerlease is a scam. James Bregar, Minerlease CEO does not reply to emails, but promises to send back 80% of the BTC invested in a contract.
Needless to say, he fails to do so. Apart from the fact that I was not aware of the 20% reduction in BTC invested, he gives zero procent back.
I have all the documents and mails to prove my statement. I will inform Bitpay about this affair and will probably send this info to the police in my country. It's a lot of hassle, but I do want to inform the people here that Minerlease is a fraud.

[piethein232]

The above said about minerlease has to do with the fact that James Bregar apparently didn''t get the equipment from Butterflylabs. He then informs his clients that they can get back 80% of their invested BTC if they, within 3 days, send the information necessary to him to send the BTC back to the customer. He promises to send the BTC back within 24 hours. SInce more than 50 hours have passed and I have have sent a couple of mails to him, nothing has passed. Not a single mail to explain why he can't send the BTC back.

[piethein232]

Ok, I have just send some basic information and warnings about minerlease.com to Bitpay.
Will see what they do with it.

[Sonny]

Minerlease is a scam. James Bregar, Minerlease CEO does not reply to emails, but promises to send back 80% of the BTC invested in a contract.
Needless to say, he fails to do so. Apart from the fact that I was not aware of the 20% reduction in BTC invested, he gives zero procent back.
I have all the documents and mails to prove my statement. I will inform Bitpay about this affair and will probably send this info to the police in my country. It's a lot of hassle, but I do want to inform the people here that Minerlease is a fraud.

The above said about minerlease has to do with the fact that James Bregar apparently didn''t get the equipment from Butterflylabs. He then informs his clients that they can get back 80% of their invested BTC if they, within 3 days, send the information necessary to him to send the BTC back to the customer. He promises to send the BTC back within 24 hours. SInce more than 50 hours have passed and I have have sent a couple of mails to him, nothing has passed. Not a single mail to explain why he can't send the BTC back.

Thanks for the heads up.
Good luck to you

[smooth]

Check my signature [with affiliate tag so he gets paid for recruiting you] for more info.

Don't fall for this. Cloud hashing deals are almost terrible deals in terms of profit margin, if not outright scams.

Ask yourself, if they have the equipment already set up and running, why would they mine for you when they can just mine for themselves? The answer is either: 1) They are charging you more than the expected output of the miners, 2) it is a scam where you can kiss your money good bye.  As far as I can tell CEX is "just" 1) and not 2) but you never know really.

[Sonny]

Check my signature [with affiliate tag so he gets paid for recruiting you] for more info.

Don't fall for this. Cloud hashing deals are almost terrible deals in terms of profit margin, if not outright scams.

Ask yourself, if they have the equipment already set up and running, why would they mine for you when they can just mine for themselves? The answer is either: 1) They are charging you more than the expected output of the miners, 2) it is a scam where you can kiss your money good bye.  As far as I can tell CEX is "just" 1) and not 2) but you never know really.

Very true.
The hashrate there is so highly priced, that you can never get your investment back with mining.
Check the built-in profit calculator there for your reference. http://cex.io/calc

[curibe]

Hello guys,

I Believe it all depends on how you look at. obviously cloudhashing, minerlease are obviously high in price.

I notice alot of ebay contracts way cheaper but you are at risk of what you are getting because of not knowing who they are or where they keep the equipment and yes owning your own equipment can consume alot of power. For example 2 180gh S1 miner can run up to 8amps without it even been overclocked. That is alot of power if you comparing to 2 servers as it will only do 2 to 3 amps.

I do sell mining contracts on my end thru ebay and i have gotten alot of positive feedback. In my experience to why i need to set my prices the way they are is because i actually do keep my equipment at a datacenter and power at a Datacenter is not cheap. Datacenter can prevent things like power outages and internet outages as well as keeping your equipment cool so that it does not overheat.


you guys can look at the contracts im selling and try my services out if you like.

http://www.ebay.com/usr/curibe155

[odolvlobo]

I do sell mining contracts on my end thru ebay ...

Either you are cheating newbies or you are losing money. Why would someone buy your mining contract for more than it will mine? Why would you sell your mining contract for less than it will mine?

[smooth]

I do sell mining contracts on my end thru ebay ...

Either you are cheating newbies or you are losing money. Why would someone buy your mining contract for more than it will mine? Why would you sell your mining contract for less than it will mine?

On ebay it is mostly profiting off newbies.

But some people do legitimately buy mining contracts to mine an alt that is more temporarily more profitable. If you don't want to spend your time chasing around the best alt you can do a little better by renting out your rig to someone willing to play that game. Often they are new or obscure alts that aren't on the big switching pools.

[sana8410]

we also sell mining contracts, but we sell them for fair USD prices. It makes no sense to take cryptocurrency in exchange for mining.

[odolvlobo]

we also sell mining contracts, but we sell them for fair USD prices. It makes no sense to take cryptocurrency in exchange for mining.

Either you are cheating newbies or you are losing money. Why would someone buy your mining contract for more than it will mine? Why would you sell your mining contract for less than it will mine?

It makes no sense to take cryptocurrency in exchange for mining.

Why does it matter which currency you take? I think stating prices in BTC makes evaluation of the contract easier, and stating prices in USD is a way to hide how much the buyer is losing in the deal.