... and cloud mining is a lost cause.
The more I look at cloud mining services, the more depressed I become about the industry. I never actually invested in cloud mining myself but I considered toying around with the idea. One of the names I heard most was PB Mining and its 5 year contracts. I even had it saved in my bookmarks with the intention of signing up one day and putting a few bits in to see how it all works. Had I decided to give cloud mining a try, I probably would have chosen them. Them and perhaps Lunamine. Both sites looked professional and they seemed to have a good reputation here on the forums.
Because of this, I was surprised when I found out in December that PB Mining had fallen apart. I don't know the full story of what happened, and I don't know enough about the details to say whether it was a complete scam or if something else happened that was beyond its owners' control. But what I do know is that the mining side of the contract isn't working like it was supposed to anymore, and that many people have seemingly lost their investment.
Then I went to see if Lunamine was still working. Unbeknownst to be, that site had long disappeared too.
Around last week, I saw a thread here about another cloud mining provider called Hashprofit. They were offering big discounts and a free trial period for new members. I did some research into the profitability but couldn't get the numbers that I wanted because of vagueness in the site's FAQ. But it seemed like a reasonable deal and they seemed to have connections with reputable organizations in the Bitcoin industry so I went to my bookmarks folder and deleted the link to Lunamine and replaced the link to PB Mining with a link to Hashprofit.
Then after a week, Hashprofit claims to have suffered from a DDOS attack and shut down its operations. Now the fate of that site seems uncertain too. There could be a chance that the site will spring back to life in early January and everything will go back to normal but the community here doesn't think so and history suggests that when a site that deals with cryptos goes offline for an extended period of time, it won't come back ever again. Just look at Mt. Gox for example. Hashprofit also had an altcoin which was meant to be backed by the site's hashrate. The performance of this altcoin - Profitcoin, seems to reflect this growing concern. It has already lost over 90 percent of its value.
Then days later, another cloud mining site falls. This time it's Hashie.co.
CEX.IO seems to be the only legitimate cloud mining site of all these. They own the largest (measured by hashrate) Bitcoin pool GHash.IO which proves that their contracts are backed by actual physical mining operations. Despite this, I never liked them very much in the beginning because I knew that their cloud mining contracts were highly unlikely to be profitable. In order to earn a profit, you were supposed to trade these contracts. You were supposed to sell unprofitable contracts to others who would buy them for a higher price than you paid for. It was a zero-sum game of musical chairs but now I realize why and I respect them for staying legitimate in an industry that is otherwise full of scams.
