I’m not super Tech savvy, but I know enough to get by. I could learn to mine from my own hardware, but I like the idea of someone mining for me.
1) So…what do you guys think of mining contracts?
Basically this would work I think. The better question is, how do you check the person who is doing this for you is trustworthy and only taking for example 10% of the Profit earned by your capital and not 50 ?
2) Separately, is it cost effective to rent space in the cloud and mine there rather than go out and buy a bunch of equipment?
Depends on what you are doing (which coin). I'm currently building up my own cloud for Primecoin, but if the difficulty rises beyond 11, I will have to consider taking my winnings and look for something else...
BTC is only profitable using asics for BTC-Mining, which as I guess, the average Cloud Service Provider does not offer.
Amazon offers GPU Cloud instances afaik, but I would be carefull about the pricing and the risk, that ASICS are quite easily developed if a GPU algorythm is applyable...
