Last month I started mining on my mid-range PC at home. I also wanted to try cloud mining to see how they compared. Mining from home uses your own hardware and electricity. If your computer isn’t powerful enough to mine more than what you spend on electricity, you may want to try cloud mining (sometimes called cloud hashing). With cloud mining, you’re effectively purchasing mining power on a server housed elsewhere. You don’t have to install or configure anything, and you don’t have to pay for electricity. The server does all the mining “up in the cloud” and every month you get paid for the work it did.
After ten days of running CudaMiner on my PC, I had received 0.0254 BTC in payouts from Middlecoin. I transferred 0.0232 BTC to Cex and spent it on cloud mining power. (My intent was to get a nice, round GH/s value, but the price rose while I was waiting for the transaction from Coinbase to propagate.)
While Middlecoin mines a variety of altcoins and pays out in BTC, Cex pays out in each individual cryptocurrency. You may convert all your altcoins into BTC via another exchange which trades those coins, or you may use your NMC to buy additional GH/s for better mining results in the future. After ten days, my balance at Cex was 0.002 BTC plus an insignificant value of altcoins. That’s about what I get from Middlecoin in just one day!
If I invest ten times as much BTC, I would mine just as much as I do with Middlecoin…but it would also take ten times longer to mine back what I initially paid. So it might look like mining from home is a more profitable solution, but there’s an important factor we haven’t considered. At any time I can sell my GH/s back at the current market value. With that in mind, let’s run some more numbers.
0.024 BTC = 1 GH/s = 0.006 BTC mined after 1 month
0.24 BTC = 10 GH/s = 0.06 BTC mined after 1 month
2.4 BTC = 100 GH/s = 0.6 BTC mined after 1 month
If you were to invest 2.4 BTC for one month and then sell your GH/s back, you could end up with 3 BTC. That’s a pretty nice return! If it helps to think about this in USD, that’s an extra $375 at today’s price you wouldn’t have if you’d kept your money in your wallet.
- The regular difficulty increase in mining means the same hashrate will mine less BTC each month, on average.
- If the value of GH/s falls suddenly, you won’t be able to get your initial investment back. It’s possible you might actually lose a significant amount of money if something like that happened before you had a few good months of mining.
- With no risk, there is no reward!
As a final note, Cex means “commodity exchange” so you may want to pronounce it like “kex” and not like “sex.” That will save you the embarrassment I had to endure!
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