A lot of novice cryptocurrency users have always shown an interesting in cloud mining solutions. Whether it is bitcoin or altcoin mining, there is always the risk of buying a cloud mining contract without seeing any significant returns. The past year has been quite difficult for cloud mining in general, despite altcoin and bitcoin prices going up spectacularly.
Cloud Mining Was Quite Profitable Over The Past Year
To put this news into perspective, one Reddit user shared his recent cloud mining statistics for the previous eleven months. It is evident the initial investment for the cloud mining contract was made at an opportune time, as the contracts were priced rather cheaply and cryptocurrency values were not that high either. To be more specific, the user purchased Scrypt mining for litecoin at first, before adding a Bitcoin mining contract on top of it later on.
As one would expect, the combination of these two contracts results in some significant returns. In fact, the user made a small profit from cloud mining in the end, nearly doubling his money in the end. This goes to show cryptocurrency cloud mining can still be a lucrative business, assuming one buys the best contract for the lowest price at an opportune moment.
What is rather telling, though, is how the cloud mining returns pale in comparison to buying the specific cryptocurrencies directly. Although it is rather easy to look back at the litecoin and bitcoin price chart right now, it was only to be expected both currencies would see some value gains over the next twelve months. Then again, it was equally possible both bitcoin’s and litecoin’s value would go down. In the end, the gains made from buying cloud mining contracts are nothing to sneeze at.
Had the user purchased both bitcoin and litecoin for the same amount of money in the same period, however, he would have made more money. Bitcoin gained US$630 in value, whereas Litecoin gained US$4.15. At the time, the user could have purchased 43.421 LTC and 0.3524 BTC. Translating that to today’s value would result in a US$574.88 gain, which is US$3.88 more compared to the cloud mining contract. A negligible difference to most people, but it still shows buying cryptocurrency outright and not relying on third-party service providers is more lucrative.
Header image courtesy of Shutterstock
