Recently I started mining Bitcoins via a Cloud Mining service. I decided to share my experience and create a blog. Here I will post my experiences and keep you informed about the costs/earnings of my project. I will try to post an update once every week or sooner if necessary.
Scroll down to read how I started (most recent posts show on top) and feel free to leave a comment or to donate when you liked reading about my project.
Here are my results of the first week!
I have made this spreadsheet in Excel, I will explain it in a moment. I have added all things, that I think might be useful. Like hash rate, BTC rate, profit and the maintenance fee. Besides that I have added the current market price per GHS and the current market value of my hashing power. Maybe selling my hashing power will be more profitable, when the miners are close to 100% maintenance fees. And It makes calculations based on Bitcoin and on US Dollar, because when the BTC price rises I can make profit by exchanging them. To have a clear overview of the trend of the prices, I have added some arrows too.
When I am getting closer to ROI, the orange/red cells should turn slowly into green. The gray cells are cells that are calculated and don’t need to be adjusted.
As you can see I made my first dollar! 🙂 However nothing exciting happened during the first week. I think it is better to wait a few more days to have a more accurate view. This gives me some time to have a closer look at all those numbers and do some research and read more about Bitcoin 😉
I signed up for an account on Hashnest as I had decided that this was the best option to choose. This gave me the opportunity to have a look inside. All you need is the “Hash” section with their different miners (each with stats, blocks, shop, code, market and history) and the wallet to deposit some BTC to invest.
The Antminer S5 has currently the lowest maintenance fee due to its low power usage, so this one got my attention. My calculations say that I won’t break even when the difficulty keeps increasing by 3% and when 1 BTC stays at $ 243/€ 217/¥ 1509; in fact I will lose 45%. But it is possible to sell your hash rate on the market to reduce loses or perhaps make some profit.
I decided to take a little risk. Nobody knows if the difficulty will increase. Recently it has even decreased. Are people turning off their miners, because they are losing money? And what will the exchange rates do? Will they go up when the block reward is cut in half? Or will they drop down? Eventually it’s all about speculation and even having Bitcoins might lose you some money. But for me it is also an opportunity to learn. I will start with ± € 130,00 worth of BTC that I transferred to my Hashnest wallet.
To have a good oversight of this project and its costs, I will try to post a summary each week. This seems a good interval and this gives me the time to analyze the results. I am not sure yet how it will look like, but I think the following things are important: daily earnings, daily fee, market price per GHS, amount of blocks found, earnings from start. All this information is provided on their website. I only have to lookup how I should interpret the chart with the market price.
First I will interpret the costs and the result of the first week. I will post them as soon as I have found a clear way to show them to you.
During my research on available Cloud Mining services I have read plenty of warnings to be aware of scams. E.g. companies that aren’t actually mining, but that are paying you your daily profits (sometimes with the investments others make). Suddenly they are gone with (most of) your investment, and since bitcoin is anonymous you can’t track them.
For me there turned out to be two companies that are recommended and trustworthy and many others with warnings and negative experiences. Bit-X and Hashnest had some good recommendations, so I took a closer look and compared them.
Maybe the maintenance fee is most important, because this affects our daily profits. First Bit-X: it has a maintenance fee of 0.00000700 BTC for 1 GHS/Day. At the moment (June 2015) this is about 69% of your daily earnings. I am not sure if the fee is changed when the BTC price rises. If not, this would mean that also your maintenance fee rises. Next is Hashnest: it has a maintenance fee of $ 0.001175 for 1 GHS/Day (Antminer S5). This is 0.00000470 BTC with today’s exchange rate of ± $250,00. At the moment this should be 46% of our daily earnings.
The price of 1 GHS is also important. Combined with the maintenance fee determines this if I eventually will break-even or not. On Bit-X a GHS costs 0.00164009 BTC and on Hashnest a GHS costs 0.00144999 BTC. So far Hashnest seems to be the best choice. It offers more GHS per BTC invested than Bit-X, with a lower maintenance fee. Besides that you can even choose between different miners. However the Antminer S5 is currently the best choice, I think. It is the most power efficient one you can choose on their website. So It would run much longer instead of the other ones before it doesn’t cover it maintenance fees anymore and is shut down.
Mining Bitcoins sounds interesting. Creating your own money, who doesn’t want that? But after all miners should cover their own electricity costs to be profitable. This is why Cloud Mining can be a good alternative for those without a cheap energy supply.
Cloud Mining gives you the opportunity to buy some hash rate in GHS instead of buying a complete miner. The miner is hosted for you in their datacenter. Payment methods may vary, but in most cases you pay a maintenance fee per GHS/day to run it. The miner keeps running as long as it is profitable and when the maintenance fee is larger than your profits, the contract will end.
Bitcoin Cloud Miner 