Cloud vs. hardware crypto currency mining in 2017

Recent events have attracted a lot of attention to crypto currencies and tokens, resulting in big interest shown toward crypto mining due to its huge profitability. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dash, Litecoin and others have seen significant spikes in total network hashing power increase.

We at simple crypto use Genesis Mining for crypto currency cloud mining, and have following discount code: wVuZfb available to help anyone get started.

There is alternative way to mine by investing into hardware, hence we discuss pros and cons of both methods below:

Pros of cloud mining compared to hardware mining

• No or very little maintenance cost due to data centres being located near cheep electricity resources and economies of scale.
• You start mining as soon as you purchase a contract, there is no waiting in line for hardware to become available and no long shipping wait times.
• Constant hash rate, your hash rate will not decrease over time due to declining efficiency of hardware or environmental factors. Typical cloud mining contracts last 2 years, which is expected life span of any mining hardware assuming it is running non stop.
• Cloud mining doesn’t occupy physical space, doesn’t create noise and requires no maintenance or initial set up on your side.
• You don’t spend time or pay extra on other mining related activities like cooling, dust cleaning, performance monitoring.
• Efficient and automatic mining pool management, which would require a lot of your own time to do with custom set up.
• There is no risk of ordering wrong mining rig parts or breaking them in the process of set up or while they are working.
• Daily payouts (automatic or manual)

Cons of cloud mining compared to hardware mining

• Cloud mining has higher initial cost compared to purchasing your own hardware, however this gap is decreasing due to high demand and low availability of GPU’s and ASIC’s.
• There are several cloud mining companies that operate in dodgy ways or are bluntly scams, however there are good and tested companies like Genesis Mining or Hash Flare.
• You loose excitement you’d otherwise get from setting up your own mining rig, fiddling with hardware and finally getting it to work.
• Hardware mining tends to require more research and thus results in miners being more educated about crypto currencies they mine and block chain in general.

All in all we support both ways of mining, hardware mining tends to be more interesting, but if you are looking to invest and don’t want to worry about potential caveats or maintenance cloud mining might be worth a try.

UPDATE1: Our first cloud mining report is now available here.

~SC