I proposed this in another thread but don't want to pollute it with an unrelated discussion.
"Would there be a way of making the fee to the hashing provider dependent on the completion of an agreed term with a multi sig transaction? eg I buy 1BTC's worth of agreed hash rate, which the mining pool pays out to the multisig address, then at the end of the term I get the mining output sent to me and the hash provider gets their fee?
If the hashing stops halfway through I get my fee refunded plus the mining output. That's also a way of betting on the network speed via the return of investment for the hash provider as I would hope to get more than my fee back. There may also need to be some kind of oracle involved in confirming the hash rate was as high as promised. I'm not sure if something like this has already been done before?"
Cloudmining companies would have to cough all the investment, pay ongoing costs and not get a dime until the completion of the contract. No one would do that.
Maybe you could do something with smart contracts, that pay out automatically in function of difficulty, btc price and some agreed upon fee structure, but its hard for me to see how you can avoid having ~2x the money at stake in escrow some place or in the blockchain. After all, theoretically the contract could become worthless, so the seller must have a guarantee (your money in escrow) and the contract could pay out many times the purchase price over time, so the buyer would need a non trivial fraction of that in escrow as guarantee as well.
So my 2 questions are:
1. Is there a viable way of making this work where both parties can trust each other via the blockchain, and potentially end up winning based on what they originally agreed on? - eg a slower network hash rate would mean the customer gets more BTC than their fee, faster hash rate means hash provider got more in fees than they would have made mining.
2. For ongoing expense payments is it possible for a multisig transaction script to include multiple payments to the hash provider over time? such as "for every day the contract is valid and hash rate is maintained, pay out a fixed portion of the fee to the hash provider?"
