Cloud mining

Cloud mining is the most scam-dense corner of this entire market, and it is also where the honest operators publish the least. The ranking above applies the same seven dimensions to every contract seller: what the all-in cost per TH is once the maintenance fee is included, whether payouts are verifiable at a pool, and whether the operator has survived more than one difficulty cycle. If you take one thing from this page, take this: the maintenance fee is the contract. Everything else is marketing.

How contract economics actually work

A contract has one cash-outflow side (up-front price + maintenance fees) and one inflow side (your share of mined coins, valued at spot when you sell). The inflow side is not yours to control - it is the product of network hashrate, block reward, and coin price, which the industry summarizes as hashprice [1]. Our hashprice page tracks it from public network data: at the current BTC figure of n/a, one terahash produces roughly four cents of gross revenue per day before any operator cut.

That single number is why contract design matters more than contract size. A 100 TH contract at a $0.05/TH/day maintenance fee carries a $5 per-day fee load - more than its entire gross revenue at today's hashprice. No hashrate number fixes that; the contract is dead on arrival and will keep billing you until it expires or you stop paying. This is exactly the failure mode the CFTC enforcement actions describe: operators who kept charging fees after the "mining" had stopped being profitable or real [5].

The death zone, in one number

Divide live hashprice by the energy draw of the machines and you get the break-even electricity price - the rate below which mining is profitable and above which every operator loses money on power alone. At the current BTC hashprice of n/a and modern S21-class efficiency (15 J/TH), break-even sits near n/a per kWh [2][3]. Three consequences follow:

• Hosting rates published at $0.04-0.085/kWh (the hosting hub lists documented ones) sit at or below break-even, which is why serious hosting operators survive curtailment seasons.
• "Free electricity" claims are not a thing. Nobody runs 300 MW for free; the cost is inside your contract price or your fee schedule.
• Retail-priced contracts are priced to the seller. If the operator cannot break even on power, the loss moves to contract holders - the structure the CFTC cases describe, where fees kept flowing after the "mining" had stopped being real [5].

Read every offer against that number before anything else. A contract that cannot pass the break-even test is not an investment; it is a subscription to someone else's loss.

The chart is the revenue side of every contract in the table - and the flat young line in the feed is the reason projections deserve your skepticism: seven days of data cannot price a difficulty cycle, which is exactly why operators' longer projections deserve the skepticism this page prices.

The proof ladder: four levels, one that matters

Cloud mining proof comes in exactly four levels, and the difference between them is the difference between evidence and screenshots [1]:

1. Pool worker you control - the operator points contract hashrate at a pool account under your name. You can see rejected shares, dropout, and hashrate swings directly at the pool. This is the strongest form and the cheapest to demand: if an operator refuses it, that refusal is your answer.
2. Pool-side stats with a shared key - you see pool stats but the address is shared. Weaker: the view can be revoked the day things go wrong.
3. On-chain payout history - verify payouts land at real addresses at real cadence. Weaker than a worker but auditable after the fact.
4. Balance counter only - a number in a web page. The majority of the scam watch archive consists of beautiful dashboards over no hashrate.

Ask for level 1 before you buy anything beyond a minimum test position. Operators who deliver real hashrate have nothing to fear from a pool worker; operators who cannot deliver it have every reason to refuse.

Payout terms: the quiet value leaks

Live from our database - caveats and sources in each linked review.

Three payout mechanics move more money than headline prices do:

• Payout threshold. If the threshold is 0.005 BTC and your contract earns 0.00002 BTC/day, you need 250 days to withdraw - which can be longer than the contract. Ask what happens to an unclaimed balance at term end; the documented providers answer, the weak ones go quiet.
• Withdrawal cadence. Weekly payouts on a falling price bleed you slowly; daily payouts let you exit fast. The reviews list documented payout frequency for every provider in the table.
• Token payouts. Covered above - revenue risk becomes token risk. If the payout token trades far below its "internal" value, your effective yield is marked down by the spread the day you exit.

Red flags specific to contract mining

Our scam watch carries the body count; these are the patterns that put operators there:

• Fixed daily returns. Mining revenue moves with coin price and difficulty; anyone quoting a fixed daily percentage is selling an investment product, not hashrate. Both CFTC cases in [5][6] involved exactly this framing.
• Referral-chain incentives. Multi-level bonuses mark a business whose real product is recruiting - the classic marker in the scams checklist.
• Projections that never model difficulty. Every honest projection shows a difficulty-growth line; every scam projection shows a straight line up.
• Lifetime contracts. A "lifetime" claim outlives the company that issued it. The graveyard is the resolution.
• New domain, old design. A fresh domain selling contracts with testimonials is the standard relaunch pattern for a previously flagged operator - check the graveyard before sending anything.

When cloud mining actually makes sense

Be precise about what you are buying: not machines, but exposure to hashprice for a term, at an operator margin. It makes sense in three cases:

• You want coins but cannot run hardware - and you accept the operator's margin is likely 30-50% of gross. Compute the implied margin in the calculator before assuming it is fair.
• You want difficulty and price exposure without operational surface. A small pay-as-you-go position on a hashrate market beats a locked contract for this.
• You are testing an operator before a bigger position. Minimum contract, first payout verified on-chain, pool worker matching - then scale. This is the single most effective scam filter available, and it is why the beginners hub leads with it.

For the trading side - hedging hashrate instead of renting it - see the hashrate markets hub. For the contract anatomy clause by clause, the hashprice guide walks through the inputs, curtailment and SLA language.