Bitcoin Cloud Mining Comparison

With the 2020 Bitcoin halving looming, cloud miners are in a state of confusion. With the price of Bitcoin going down, the mining earning prospects are pretty loomy. While some think that the next halving, despite causing miners to earn half the reward for the same hasrate, could create a surge in price as was seen for the previous havings in 2016 and 2012, some estimate that the price increase is already accounted in, because of the price spike to 13k$ a few months back.

Cloud mining is the practice of renting or leasing hashrate rather than buying miners. The obvious advantage is to mine Bitcoin without having to take care of machine and farm management, along with a guaranteed hashrate. While the hashrate ROI fluctuates, mostly going slowly down as the network hashrate increases,

Cloud mining is a tricky business

At the moment, cloud mining is not interesting. Mostly what we see is farms replete of hashrate from Antminer S9 that mine 13TH/s at 1.3kW, which just became non profitable in September 2019. They try to sell this obsolete hashrate instead of just turning of the machines. Why? Because those farms cannot replace the miners at once for more profitable ones. Upfront investment would be too high, and supply is not enough. However the electricity contracts are not flexible like your house electricity; they are usually based on a fixed power supply, which is pure loss if unused.

With Bitcoin going down 20% in the past weeks, mining with s9 comes at a loss, and renting some of this hashrate cannot be positive. And renting it makes no sense either.