Well may be or not a Scam, I feel is someone not considering all the costs, For january the best deal looks Cointerra for about u$s 3 per GH.
But to operate the miner 1 year costs another $3.
So the lowest possible cost today is like u$s 6 for January. BFL probably will shot Feb or March and will be a total loss.
You cant check many offers more "tangible" some will start mining in October if you still found some available contracts.
http://www.topminingcontracts.com TMC
You are correct, but is not as bad as you make it seem. I already have all of the infrastructure equipment (firewalls, switches, servers, etc) because of my line of work
Power contract for the data center = $0.036 kWh
Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) = 1.5
Device = 2 TH/s (2,000 GH/s)
DaysPerMonth = 30.4
HoursPerDay = 24
KiloWattHour = $0.036
DevicePowerUsage = 1.2 kW
PUE = 1.5
(30.4) x (24) x (0.036) x (1.2) x (1.5) = $47.28 per device per month.
$47.28 is your base monthly cost per device, and you host 8 devices (9.6 kW) per rack = $378.24 per rack = ($0.024 per GH/s)
The data center charges me $933 per rack (at wholesale) per month. As you can see, this is excellent wholesale pricing for data center space and power.
So now let us look at the bigger picture for 1 year. To host 1 PH/s @ 1.2 kW per device, you need 63 racks = ($933 x 63 x 12) = $705,348.
I sale 1,000,000 GH/s for $3.00 per GH/s = $3,000,000 - $705,348 = $2,294,652
$2,294,652 go towards the purchase of hardware at volume pricing plus I pay for the difference out of pocket.
I am betting that I will make enough in transaction fees for a net a profit of 5% ($150,000) or less over 12 months. Also I will have 1 PH/s of equipment at the end of the year and that is when I will start to make a decent profit. I already sold 100 TH/s to another early adopter last week with no BTC guarantees, 90% to go.