If you are as interested in the mining industry as me, you may notice that most of the cloud mining services have gone “out of stock” or “sold out”, or even stopped working. I’ve decided to check the situation and find out, what’s wrong with this type of mining.

A few days ago I’ve been browsing whattomine.com webpage and caught my eyes on the banner, saying that some service is drawing a prize of 1,000 cloud mining contracts. Following my interest and curiosity, I’ve followed the link and found BitDeer service, where plan samples could be seen. But for some reason, they’ve seemed a bit strange for me and I decided to make some calcs.

Here you can see the main page of BitDeer. Looks fancy and promising — limited-time contracts, not to drain your funds for endless profitless mining, quite low price and looks-like-real hashrates. But the devil is in details.

Let’s visit CryptoCompare to check these proposed 50 TH/s for Bitcoin mining.

With zero fees, power consumption and price per KWh, we can see, that daily profit with 50 TH/s will be 0.002162 BTC, or around $7.45, or $1341 for the whole contract’s period. With $331.89 funded, it’s going to be more than $1000 profit from the contract. But no such luck. The trick is that in addition to the contract’s price, you’ll need to pay for daily maintenance, which calculates just as potential profit is — per TH per day.

Here you see, that daily maintenance fee is “just” $0,10 per TH per day. Or $5 per day, or $900 for the contract’s time. So now we have $1341 — $331.89 — $900 = $109.11, or $0.60 daily. Still profitable, but much less than assumed.

What is “180 days”? It’s around half a year! During the last 6 months, BTC’s network difficulty raised for 25% and got low back, yet the exchange rate went down too, for 50%! I know, that it sounds like silly assumes, but the profitability is so, that even small changes in difficulty or exchange rate during the time of contract will lead to the negative profitability of the entire thing. With the highest difficulty for the last 6 month (just a month ago) daily mined BTC with such contract will be equal to $6.11, or -$0.74.

And it’s not about only BitDeer! All these services proposing more or less the same conditions, with almost the same fees and inputs. It means that the entire cloud mining sphere, with current difficulty and exchange rate fluctuations, is not worth the investments. In the best case, you may receive some smaller amount of coins, but the most likely you will get nothing or even lose some of your funds.