Mining Contracts? What's good and bad about them?

[jaredk]

I'm looking for information about mining contracts. I currently only have a Compaq laptop and I do not have the capability to GPU mine, therefore I have looked to the option of building a mining rig. After looking through the prices and estimated running costs, I've decided that mining rigs are out of my budget. My budget is about 125 - 150 USD. I thought I was going to be stuck in CPU mining land forever. I've been hearing more and more about mining contracts but can't find that much about them online. Perhaps I am not looking the the right areas?
xJared

[1714881083]

1714881083

[Keninishna]

You can find them here, as far as I know how mining contracts work is you are essentially giving out a loan for bitcoins in the future and due to the price volatility and changes in difficulty it ends up being a gamble most of the time unless you can find a really cheap contract. 150$ really isn't much money but you can always play the market and day trade. Another thought is you could find a cheap ps3 off ebay like one with a broken blu-ray drive and use that to mine. I think it does about 80 mh/s.

[error]

If you buy now, that'll get you 10 BTC, likely much more than you'd get from a mining contract.

[Skeenz]

As mentioned, there are a number of guys selling mining contracts. (From the looks of things, I'd say Vladimir has an incredibly snazzilicious operation going on)

Other options:
(A) use the GLBSE to invest in one of the upcoming mining companies, however there has been at least one company that buckled due to the recent difficulty increases (as well as the system maintenance)

(B) find a friend who has a good graphics card, and pay him to run the miner on his PC. Since he has no need for the bitcoins (and he's your friend), he'd be fine with accepting a price (per bitcoin) that's less than current market value.

Using B, you'd end up with more bitcoins than if you bought it on one of the bitcoin markets.

p.s. Of course, these are only two options... there are tons more!

[film2240]

You can find them here, as far as I know how mining contracts work is you are essentially giving out a loan for bitcoins in the future and due to the price volatility and changes in difficulty it ends up being a gamble most of the time unless you can find a really cheap contract. 150$ really isn't much money but you can always play the market and day trade. Another thought is you could find a cheap ps3 off ebay like one with a broken blu-ray drive and use that to mine. I think it does about 80 mh/s.

I read that the PS3 can only do 26MHash/s at best on the mining hardware comparison site.Which is slower than my old Radeon HD4670 OC'd to the max (my current gpu is radeon HD 6950 OC'd and shade unlocked and gives me 400MHash/s)

[NetTecture]

(A) use the GLBSE to invest in one of the upcoming mining companies, however there has been at least one company that buckled due to the recent difficulty increases (as well as the system maintenance)

I will never understand how that works, but then those "companies" are basically illegal imho (not registered as business) and operate on a scale that makes most people laugh.

If you want good return on investment, you must invest Heavily. And put up some more money to get infrastructure save. And have admins etc. in the calculation.

US maybe a ad place for that

Lets hope the final negotiations for my data center go well. Place for 84 Racks for mining - all in all 1344 computers full of cards Not taht I start with it - it is profitable with 16 computers in it, and we wil have 32 by September.