Cloud Mining

Rather than buying and running physical hardware, a cloud mining customer pays a provider for a slice of an already-built mining farm's output, delivered as a stream of rewards proportional to the hash rate purchased. Contracts are typically priced per terahash or petahash per second, sold for a fixed term or an open-ended lease, with the provider deducting electricity and maintenance fees from the daily payout before crediting the remainder to the buyer's account or wallet.

The model exists to remove the usual barriers to mining: sourcing hardware, securing cheap power, and managing heat, noise, and around-the-clock uptime. Three variants have developed. Traditional cloud mining sells contracts where the provider owns and runs everything. Hosted mining lets a customer buy physical rigs that are then housed and serviced in someone else's facility. Hashpower marketplaces simply broker capacity directly between miners with spare rigs and buyers who want it, often for short bursts rather than long contracts.

Returns are never guaranteed: they shrink or disappear as network difficulty rises or coin prices fall, and many contracts contain clauses that terminate automatically once daily revenue drops below the maintenance fee, wiping out the remaining term. The sector has also attracted large-scale fraud. HashFlare, once one of the biggest cloud mining brands, was found by US prosecutors to have faked its mining dashboards and paid customers from new deposits rather than real output, defrauding hundreds of thousands of people before it was shut down. Guaranteed daily returns, unverifiable data center locations, and aggressive referral bonuses remain the clearest signs of a scam rather than a genuine service.