is Bitcoin too expensive to buy ? Mine them instead

Bitcoins with minimal investments and faster ROI and what risks am I taking?

Bitcoin prices has been sky rocketing and all the cryptocurrencies are following the lead. There are 2 ways to get bitcoins

1. We buy and trade the bitcoin in the exchange like Coinbase, Gemini etc
2. by mining the bitcoins.

What is Bitcoin mining ? you can read here.

I took the mining approach for getting bitcoins and I will tell you my story.

I was showing lot of interest in mining bitcoins. I was trying to seek the machine to mine bitcoins. The most powerful machine on market today that can mine bitcoin is Antminer s9 with gives hashrate from 11.5TH/s — 14TH/s with the power consumption of 1127W — 1372W. This machine (Original Cost : $1415) is in high demand and almost sold out from manufacturer, every other shop you can possibly find and where ever it still available its madly priced ( $4800 — $6000) and the prices of these machines are going up as bitcoin prices are going up.

Pros :

Approximately it can make 0.8–1.1 BTC / Year ($16K — $18K) which is again based on the current difficulty of SHA 256 which is increasing as more coins are being mined.

Cons:

The cons of doing this you need atleast $6000 ready to start this kind of investment and you have to live with extreme noise and heat this machine is going to generate.

I am a small investor and I don’t want to invest huge dollars and more importantly bear with the noise/heat and loose my sleep over it , So what to do now ?……

I looked upon is cloud mining (which is something like AWS analogy to regular data center) which means some body else will mine for you and you buy the hash rate you wish to buy, which translates I don’t have to invest a whole lot and more importantly I don’t have to deal with the noise/heat.

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Hashflare is the one of the cloud miners who sell their has rate as a year contract sounded very interesting to me, you can buy as low 10GH/s to 50 TH/S which gives the flexibility on how much I need to invest.

I bought 4TH/S which costed me $600 for 1 year contract and here is the forecasted returns

So according to this I will be making $357.91 per month for an investment of $600/Year. So I will get my ROI in 2 months based on the current rate of bitcoin as the payout are made in BTC daily and remaining 10 months of revenue is the profit which is promising for a small investor like me.

That all sounds promising what are the cons here ?….

1. First of all you are leaning on someone external to mine coins whom are not aware of , is this trust worthy ? what this turns out to be a scam ?
2. As coins get mined the SHA-256 puzzles are going to get harder either you need more power to solve and get less BTC as payout based on the hashrate you own.
3. All the payouts are always made in BTC which means you are not going to see your USD until you transfer to your wallet and exchange them for BTC.
4. If BTC prices falls all these calculations are up in the air.

I didn’t mean to scare you but these are the facts and one must understand the risk involved in investing before getting into it.

After a lot of deliberation I decided to go signup for Hashflare and see how fruitful it is and this is what I did.

Hashflare account setup process :

So if you would like to invest small amount like I did or even lesser/more depending on your investment plan on your mind and get a faster ROI, you may use Hashflare. You can signup for an account by clicking this link and you can signup with your info and buy the hashrate you wish to purchase. Please make sure you select SHA-256 to buy hashrates for mining bitcoins.

Interestingly the most popular mining machine which is antminer s9 mentioned before. If you want to buy hash rate similar to that it will cost you $2250 as shown below. looking at first glance you may think this is cheap in real its not because its only leased to you for an year instead of you owning it.

Once you have account setup

Security : First things first, goto Settings and enable 2 factor authentication and download “Authy” app on your phone so that no one else can access your account without the token on the app.

Once you hit proceed you can either buy hashrate by sending them BTC or by Credit card.

I did it by using my credit card as I felt its safer but you can do it however you want , here is what you have to do to successfully buy with credit card.

Credit Card Purchase Process :

When you provide credit card info and attempt to checkout its obviously going to get denied as its a foreign transaction .once you receive your message on your phone from your credit card company that where you attempting to buy the charge just acknowledge and try again (i.e , goto buy the hashrate /SHA-256 and try again, ignore the message “Invaid purchase”)

Once you do it for second time It will ask for a confirmation number to enter. to get the confimation number ,You need to open your credit card transaction from your credit card company and get it. It will be appended to charge as shown below.

In my case the confirmation is 4176 as this is appended to actual charge.

Once you provide the confirmation you should see the message on Dashboard on Hashflare as “Purchase confirmed”. and then the hash rate you bought should show in the dashboard.

Maintenance Fee :

In every mining there is a maintenance fee (electricity charges and other charges ) ,Hashflare charges $0.0035 per 10GH/S for 24 hrs. so in my case

1 TH/s = 1000 GH/s . I bought 4TH/s which is

0.0035 * 100 * 4 = $1.40/per day which will be automatically debited from the amount you earned you don’t have to pay this separate.

Hashflare Payout was 0.00061632 and 0.000007854 is maintenance debited

Payout :

The payout are not updated in realtime due to the load. Hashflare only updates between 0.00 to 13:00 UTC and you can see this message on their dashboard. so wait for a day atleast to see your BTC amount going up until then it will show as “0” BTC.

Conclusion :

I am venturing into cloud mining to see how fruitful it is ?. My readers wish me good luck. I understand the risk involved in what I did.

Happy cloud mining !!! If you wish to invest you can use this link “Hashflare” which gives me a referral. If you like this read leave me clap and share with your friends.

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