Mining Ethereum on your own can be difficult: you need to buy a PC, graphics cards, make sure the PC has a power supply that’s large enough to support the graphics cards, and install and configure the mining software. Then there’s the cost of electricity to keep the PC running all day and all night, plus the noise of the fans. Then, you need to keep the PC someplace where there’s plenty of dust-free, dry, and cool cool air and preferably keep it in an area where there’s nothing flammable around. Once everything is running, you need to make sure your miner is actually mining and take care of any issues that are bound to come up.
There is an easier way – cloud mining. With cloud mining, you pay for hashpower and get a payout every day based on the underlying miners’ output. The nice thing about this approach to selecting hashpower is that you choose only how much hashpower you want to pay for – you don’t have to choose a whole miner’s hashpower. Cloud mining services also subtract a maintenance and electricity fee in one form or another from the miner’s daily profit. The fee covers the miner’s cost of electricity and the coves the provider’s cost of staff who maintain the miners. This article describes three mining services: Genesis Mining, HashFlare, and EoBot.
Genesis Mining
Signup with Genesis Mining is simple – you just provide them with your email address and a password. You fund your account using your credit card or bitcoin. Buying hashpower is a simple matter of selecting Ethereum and then using a slider to configure how much hashpower you want and how much you want to pay. Once the miner is up and running, you’ll see its output on your dashboard where you’ll see your daily profitability and maintenance and electricity fee. Genesis Mining was established in February 2014 and supports a range of other coins in addition to Ethereum.
HashFlare
Signup is simple and takes less than a minute. When you’re ready, you buy the hashing power you want and pay for it by bank transfer or bitcoin. Once the miners are running for you, you’ll see your daily profitability on a dashboard, less the maintenance and electricity fee. After your account reaches a certain balance, you can request a withdrawal. In addition to Ethereum HashFlare was established in 2014 and supports Bitcoin mining, LiteCoin, and Dash.
EoBot
EoBot is unique among cloud mining providers in that you don’t have to wait for a daily payout period – payouts are available every minute. Contract durations range between 24h and five years. The website is not as easy to use as the other providers, yet signup is straight-forward, and you pay for hashpower using bitcoin or credit card. Payouts are daily and are less their maintenance and electricity fee. EoBot was established in 2013 and supports a range of other coins in addition to Ethereum.
Conclusion
This article explained the difference between mining on your own and using cloud mining services and described three Ethereum cloud mining services.