Bitcoin Cloud Mining : Legit or Scam?

Tanate Sukonrattanamaetee
6 min readJun 12, 2021

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You guys may have heard about the Bitcoin (BTC) mining, right?

And yes, you may realize that the Bitcoin mining is not that easy even using the ASIC miner (Specific BTC miner) due to the following challenges:

BTC Mining with ASIC Challenges

  1. Quite expensive!
  2. High temperature (60–80 in degree celsius)
  3. Noisy (70–90 decibels)
  4. High power consumption (The electricity cost is expensive in many countries)
  5. Difficult for maintenance and repair by ourselves
ASIC Miner : Specific BTC Mining machine : Powerful + many challenges

Someone may find out later that mining the Ethereum (ETH) using GPU cards can overcome these limitations, right?

Sadly , the ETH mining with GPU got some challenges as well:

ETH Mining with GPU Challenges

  1. Still expensive!
  2. Once ETH2.0 Proof-of-Stake is fully launched. Its algorithm will not work with GPU cards (Proof-of-work) anymore
  3. GPU cards is not effective for mining BTC anymore. So, if ETH2.0 comes, you will need to switch to mine other low-demand coins and it may not take enough profits to break even in 2–3 years (Don’t forget that BTC/ETH ranked as the 1st and the 2nd in term of crypto market capitals while the 3rd now is BNB which is a non-mineable coin)
GPU Card : Able to mine ETH/RVN/CFX/ERG/FIRO/etc. (Statistics as-of May 5th, 2021 from whattomine.com)

With these challenges, you may decide to switch from mining to start trading or DeFi (Decentralized Finance), right?

Before doing that, there is another way to mine and overcome those challenges. It is “Cloud Mining”…

Cloud Mining

So many people always warn that the cloud mining is totally a scam or Ponzi Scheme. Is that right?

I’m gonna tell you the truth. Yes, almost of them. Even some of those top-ten cloud mining websites guaranteed by so many articles.

However, before surrendering on BTC mining, let me share my thought about the Pros/Cons of the cloud mining and my check lists that may help you easily filter out the scammer from your list.

A Cloud Mining Provider

Cloud Mining — Pros:

  1. You can buy partial of the mining machine or buy the hash rate which each unit is not that expensive
  2. No need to care about the temperature and noise
  3. Low electricity cost if you select the cloud mining farm located in Russia, China, Iceland, and more
  4. No need to care about the maintenance by ourselves

Cloud Mining — Cons:

1. The well known cloud mining providers always offer too expensive hash rates

2. The unknown cloud mining providers are mostly the scammer

3. They always increase the price of hash rate or mining machines immediately after the BTC/ETH price make All-time-high (ATH)

4. Even you find the legit company, you still may not get the brand new machine as being advertised and may not get the 100% capacity machine

At this point, if you still decide to take risk on cloud mining approach. There are at least 3 things in my check-list to prove the cloud mining provider before investment:

Scammer Detection Check-List:

  1. Check their trustworthiness in trustpilot.com / etc.
  2. Test their support efforts by asking questions in their website support on-call or their telegram
  3. Try little investment amounts to prove that you can withdraw the BTC mined from their website

My Lessons Learned:

To emphasize how importance of above check-list. I decide to share my long stories about the mining experiences and lessons learned since Jan 2021 until now:

  • Getting to know the Bitcoin from the video clip regarding how to mine BTC using NiceHash
  • Start mining Bitcoin (BTC) by renting the Linux cloud server with GPU cards embedded from Cherry server services and installed the “nuxhash” software to mine BTC on Linux server
  • Switch to mine Ethereum on Linux server using cudominer. Quite easy to mine but trade-off with quite high performance fee on cudominer itself
  • Change to use free mining software and mine ETH on Spark pool (Got higher profits)
  • Getting to know Scammer CCG Mining (Poland Mining Company) and already bought their hashrate but got nothing back for 5 months -> This is 100% Scammer! See evidence below.

!!!Scam Alert : CCG Mining : Paid 410USD but got only this invoice!!!

Scam Alert : CCG Mining : Paid 410USD but got only this invoice
  • Getting to know Scammer Doge.live (Doge mining website) which is 100% scammer. When I tried to withdraw my deposited DOGE, this website sent my DOGE to their own address (A5EA2B58FE15369XXX) instead of mine. 100% Scammer! See evidence below.

!!!Scam Alert : Doge.live : When I tried to withdraw my deposited DOGE, this website sent my DOGE to their own address (A5EA2B58FE15369XXX) instead of mine!!!

Scam Alert : Doge.live : When I tried to withdraw my deposited DOGE, this website sent my DOGE to their own address (A5EA2B58FE15369XXX) instead of mine
  • Getting to know HashNest.com. Bought Z11 machine (ZEC mining) but got very low hash rate which is not the same rate as advertised in their website. Moreover, they keep turning-off our machines very often due to so many reasons (Relocation, electricity shortage, machine maintenance, etc.). So, I decided to sell all my hash rates after 3 months passed. Even this one is not a scammer but I think this company is totally not fair to their customer!
  • Getting to know cloud.bemine (Russian mining company) which is still legit for me since Jan 2021 until now. I’ve bought partial of 3 ASIC machines (43% of T17+, 6% of S17+ and 5% of A10 PRO) as you can see in below screenshot and keep trying to prove this provider by withdrawing the BTC mined (around 0.005 BTC) from this farm every month and will continue proving it until getting all my investment back
  • UPDATE — Since March 2024, cloud bemine is not legit anymore. They shut the miners down since the crypto winter and promised to reopen the miners once the crypto bull comes BUT they didn’t do as promised

NOT Legit anymore : Cloud.bemine (Russian Cloud Mining Provider)

My mining machines on cloud.bemine : 0.43 T17+ & 0.06 S17+ & 0.05 ASIC A10 PRO
My latest 3 months withdrawal histories from cloud.bemine

Lastly, if you are interested in any cloud mining provider. Always assume that it is a “scammer” then try to eliminate all your concerns before investment.

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Tanate Sukonrattanamaetee

A Software engineer who loves reading and sharing any interesting and useful things