New to cryptos - looking for opinions on lifetime cloud vouchers

[BrendonM]

Hi everyone, my introduction to cryptos started with Doge, I bought some online thinking it would go up in value as the market grew and more merchants accepted it- it did, then it dipped back down not much later.  Once I realized that there were other, non-novelty cryptos out there I found this site (http://coinmarketcap.com/).  I was overwhelmed by how many there were, but from my limited research most of them looked pointless (my Fedoracoin wallet wont even update blocks  ).  I took a primary interest in Bitcoin because it had the largest market and was the most well established (and was worth a whopping $500).  I read a few articles which made it clear that since I showed up a little late for the show, my computer was now worthless for mining.  When I looked up bitcoin on ebay to buy some straight up I instead found these lifetime mining vouchers where other people sell you part of the power of their machines.  Without doing any research I bought ~32 GH/s and a 200GH/s 24 hour contract for probably $50 in total.  Its been a day and I've made ~0.004 BTC (2 whopping dollars).  The contract turned a negative of 3$, and the lifetime vouchers have only made me about 50 cents so far (I was slowly buying the vouchers over the last day so I only hit 32GH/s in the last few hours). 

Before I get in too deep I wanted to get the input of more seasoned crypto-collectors.  Buying mining capacity seems sort of like acquiring stocks in the crypto stock market, and at Cex.io I also get other forms of currency (Doge, Litecoin, Namecoin, and some others I know nothing about), maybe if I invest in some of these up-and-comers I can forgive myself for not calling Bitcoin a waste of time ~4 years ago.

What are your thoughts on these vouchers?  I have a rule of not paying more than $2(USD) per GH/s, but enough small payments can add up fast, and at 50c a day my break-even time is gonna increase pretty quickly.  What does the future of mining look like?  Are we soon approaching the time when mining becomes a lottery game?

[DrG]

In the world of crypto there is pretty much one name to the layman - Bitcoin.

To people on these forums, everybody know Bitcoin, Litecoin, Doge, XPM, Dark, Monero, etc.

To the scammy devs this looks like a feast for which newbie should I drain funds from today with a premine:
http://mapofcoins.com/

If you want to gamble bet on one of the lesser known coins.  This forum is called bitcointalk - I would bet mostly on bitcoin.

I would also avoid all mining and cloud mining - it does nothing other than transfer money from your bank account to the company - there's no option for profit really when you do the numbers.

[Mabsark]

I would also avoid all mining and cloud mining - it does nothing other than transfer money from your bank account to the company - there's no option for profit really when you do the numbers.

If you think mining is just there to transfer money to the miner makers then you have a serious misunderstanding of how bitcoin works. Mining is absolutely essential to bitcoin. Without it, there would be no transactions at all.

You don't need to mine with the purpose of making a profit, you can do it as a way to convert fiat into bitcoin without the hassles of dealing with banks and exchanges with regards to bitcoin. Some people might even mine for ideological reasons. Sure, making a profit is nice but it's not a necessity. If you're in it to make a profit, you're best off going with in stock miners instead of pre-orders as it makes difficulty estimations far easier and more accurate.

[DrG]

I would also avoid all mining and cloud mining - it does nothing other than transfer money from your bank account to the company - there's no option for profit really when you do the numbers.

If you think mining is just there to transfer money to the miner makers then you have a serious misunderstanding of how bitcoin works. Mining is absolutely essential to bitcoin. Without it, there would be no transactions at all.

You don't need to mine with the purpose of making a profit, you can do it as a way to convert fiat into bitcoin without the hassles of dealing with banks and exchanges with regards to bitcoin. Some people might even mine for ideological reasons. Sure, making a profit is nice but it's not a necessity. If you're in it to make a profit, you're best off going with in stock miners instead of pre-orders as it makes difficulty estimations far easier and more accurate.

Mabsark - we're both here since 2011.  We don't need to explain to each other why people/BTC needs mining. If you look back at my post history you will find I have told newbies there are several reasons to mine, unfortunately I haven't posted it recently

I always posted this as my list to newbies:
-support the network/decentralize
-enjoy the mining process
-make more from mining than you could from buying
-mine your own coins that have no transaction history for greater anonymity.

The first 2 reasons are still valid and for many people like myself will be until the day IF BTC fails.

The last 2 reasons I can't say are true anymore.  I think most miners agree they cannot make ROI with current hardware.  And nobody can really solo mine at home - if they could I would see a thread "I found a block with my S3 or Dragon"

But cloud mining is does not support decentralization.  It forces hashes into massive farms that get digitally sold out but the farm owner could always lend themselves to a 51% attack.  Cloud mining is only good for miner employment.  That's my view - tell me if you agree.

[BrendonM]

But cloud mining is does not support decentralization.  It forces hashes into massive farms that get digitally sold out but the farm owner could always lend themselves to a 51% attack.  Cloud mining is only good for miner employment.  That's my view - tell me if you agree.

If I was to spread out my cloud mining across some smaller up-and-coming sites, even if it didn't make a fast and easy profit, would it help the decentralization process?

[Mabsark]

The last 2 reasons I can't say are true anymore.  I think most miners agree they cannot make ROI with current hardware.  And nobody can really solo mine at home - if they could I would see a thread "I found a block with my S3 or Dragon"

The thing with mining is that you can't determine the change in difficulty each round and therefore you can't determine if you'll break-even. You may plug in a 30% increase per month into a calculator and get a result saying that you'll never break-even. It could be that the hash rate increases by only 10% per month and you make a nice profit. Or it could be 50% per month and you make an even bigger loss. So, it's basically gambling on the rate of change of the hash rate.

But cloud mining is does not support decentralization.  It forces hashes into massive farms that get digitally sold out but the farm owner could always lend themselves to a 51% attack.  Cloud mining is only good for miner employment.  That's my view - tell me if you agree.

My view of cloud hashing is that you may as well just play the BDD game on Havelock.

[DrG]

The last 2 reasons I can't say are true anymore.  I think most miners agree they cannot make ROI with current hardware.  And nobody can really solo mine at home - if they could I would see a thread "I found a block with my S3 or Dragon"

The thing with mining is that you can't determine the change in difficulty each round and therefore you can't determine if you'll break-even. You may plug in a 30% increase per month into a calculator and get a result saying that you'll never break-even. It could be that the hash rate increases by only 10% per month and you make a nice profit. Or it could be 50% per month and you make an even bigger loss. So, it's basically gambling on the rate of change of the hash rate.

But cloud mining is does not support decentralization.  It forces hashes into massive farms that get digitally sold out but the farm owner could always lend themselves to a 51% attack.  Cloud mining is only good for miner employment.  That's my view - tell me if you agree.

My view of cloud hashing is that you may as well just play the BDD game on Havelock.

It's true that end users won't know what the difficulty jumps will be.  They are forced to hope they make a return.  They are taking risk.

The ASIC manufacturers who get hardware for 20 cents to 50 cents on the price they charge don't really have to worry about that since they assuredly will make a profit.  All the risk has been transferred to the end user.  If life higher risk should yield higher reward.  Here we have a scenario where higher risk is yielding lower reward (the end user).  If people want to continue that behavior so be it...