I think if you are a miner, you won't shut down your gear just because at the moment the BTC price is too low and it doesn't make economical sense. What if tomorrow it shoots up to 600$? then you will regret you didn't mine more.
With cloud services this might be different, but I don't think a single person shouldn't judge its mining profitability based on 24hour price of BTC.
There is a controversial argument on the forums in general:
1. Hold bitcoin because its price will go up, don't use it, just buy it and HOOOOOLD
2. It doesn't make sense to mine because I only make 10$ and my electricity costs 11$ NOW
Am I the only one who doesn't get this?
Regarding cloud services I red a comment at some other site saying
"CEX.io doesn't actually need to have any sort of mining equipment. Since the price of 1 GH/s is much more than it will EVER earn for you, when you buy a GH/s they will simply pay back part of it to you as "mining"."
Made me think....
That last paragraph of yours is exactly what the Ponzi scheme is. I setup a cloud mining service and sell you a 5TH/s contract for $4000 for a year. Assuming BTC is $400 a coin, you either will pay me 10
BTC or I will purchase 10
BTC with the $4000 you send me. Even with 10% difficulty jumps, you are not going to "mine" that 10
BTC. At the end of your year's contract, you'll still be down 0.6
BTC, meaning I've made that profit for myself. Now, I get a whole bunch of people to sign up, offering different levels of contracts for different prices (the smaller the contract, the higher $/GH/s I charge).
In this scenario, I have never once setup any actual mining hardware. I'm using the money I'm getting in for these contracts to payout the customers and keeping a percentage of it for myself. As the service provider, I can adjust my pricing as needed, so if BTC rises in cost, I adjust my contract pricing upwards. If it goes down, I can adjust down. As long as I have some BTC and new customers signing up, I can keep on running the scheme.
This is why people like myself are constantly asking cloud mining providers for proof of their kit and proof of actual mining. Very very few actually do. So far, I believe Justin from MegaMine has been the only one to come on here and show off his setup. Others come up with excuses as to why they can't.