Ask HN: Is cloud mining profitable? - 1k
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user5994461
It's highly profitable. AWS makes a lot of money out of people who try.

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hamstercat
The question you must ask yourself is why are miners renting their gear for
other people to use? If it was profitable at the current price, they could
simply mine themselves and skip the rental part.

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plantain
Because they are booking a guaranteed upfront profit, and passing the risk on
to the customer? Don't mine for gold, sell shovels.

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tedunangst
Profit is hardly guaranteed considering capital costs. Disregarding that, I'm
not sure shovels are the best comparison. Coin mining is pretty predictable in
aggregate, unlike gold mining. If you own mining hardware, you can calculate
expected income pretty reliably.

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eitland
Except you cannot calculate the price of the mined coins predictably.

So renting out mining gear can either be a bet that you think crypto will
decline or just a way to reduce risk. (I'm assuming up front payments. )

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csomar
There are futures to hedge against that.

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caseysoftware
A couple years ago, there were scripts that would watch Github commits for AWS
(or other) credentials. If it found them, it would fire up instances and mine
as much as possible until they were shut down.

And ROI is easy when your I is near zero..

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phaus
I think it can be assumed OP isn't asking whether committing a felony is
profitable.

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nickwes
Cloud mining is only profitable if you have a lot of equipment allocated to
under mined coins. If a coin has a low enough difficulty you can overflow with
hashing power and earn a profit depending on the difficulty and how often the
coin re-targets. A coin like Aptcoin or other non-asic mineable coins can
create this situation.

But mostly no. It is almost exclusively more profitable to just buy the coins.

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adamlindsay
No and it never well be. Lets consider AWS. On-demand pricing, even reserve is
never even going to be close, simply because there exists Amazons overhead,
profit, etc. built into the cost. The only possible chance is spot instances.
Spot instances start to approach a "free market". The pricing will adjust
based on supply and demand. There still exists AWS overhead, as they aren't
going to run them at a loss, just far less profit. If the price of say the p3
family of instances approached a profitable price point, then others would
flock to using them, driving up the price, causing them to no longer be
profitable. There also exist external use cases, such as AI, which can justify
the computation power at a higher price point, as the value of the computation
might exceed the value gained from mining.

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superkuh
Not unless you're the one renting out the miners.

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Rjevski
Doubt it. If it was profitable the cloud mining providers would be mining for
themselves instead of renting out the gear.

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Vanit
Considering the benchmark for profitable mining is against electricity
costs... It's a no from me.

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throwaway848483
This investment strategy is usually dominated by the simpler strategy of just
buying the coin.

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airbreather
For who, the miner or minee?

