RE: Genesis mining....Is it a scam or legit? Is it a good investment or bad?
Anybody who can use a profit calculator can figure this out. You are thinking in terms of dollars and not crypto-currencies though, I personally have my own mining rig and am building them as fast as I can get GPUs, I understand that the difficulty will increase and 2 years from now the likelyhood of being able to mine the same currency with my current rigs is practically none, but what I can do at least is switch to whatever currency I can mine with GPUs. Now what I mean is don't think of your mining contract like it pays out dollars, because it doesn't it pays ETH, BTC, ETC. Right now my rig mines about 2.4 ETH a month, that comes out to 28.8 a year (Not accounting for difficulty increase but even if i end up with 15 at the end of the year because it doubles thats fine with me). The way you see it that would be about $8,064 in a year but the way I am looking at it is, BTC is hovering around 2k and has historically hit 3k, in the near future one bitcoin could be worth 10k each, I believe that ETH is going to overtake BTC in that case the price of ETH could reach upwards of $1,000 each in the next year or two, that means that when my investment in mining and holding ETH matures I will be able to cash out for about 15-28K a year on each computer with only a 3k investment. As opposed to buying 30 Ethereum now, I will be able to mine it, and continue to mine other currencies for years to come. I agree Genesis mining isn't as profitable as people make it out to be but its a good way for people to get their foot in the door and as an investment it has a better ROI than most things in this world if you aren't computer savvy.
You can get your foot in the door by just using whatever money you were going to pay genesis to mine, and instead buying btc, eth, Monero, whatever for whatever it's at. How annoying would it be if someone pays Genesis $500 to mine and in a week btc shoots up $500 a coin. That person will hate mined basically nothing, and if they would've just bought bitcoin, would be up 20%. Ether is still profitable if you do it on your own which most people will never do. Bitcoin is not profitable even to do on your own. Mining on your own has nothing to do with what I'm saying regardless. Mining with genesis is a joke and you'll never make as much money as if you'd just buy the coin. That's my point
I guess I lost my train of thought in my essay but I understand what you are saying, let's do some math, GPUs run about 300$ for a good miner that hashes 25Mh/s that will produce about 4 ETH a year (baring insane difficulty increase) on genesis mining you can buy a 25MH/s contract for $750, so clearly they over charge you on hardware, but on the other hand you don't pay for electricity and you have 0 hardware downtime. So in one year a rig with one 25MH/s GPU would make you about $1139 by todays prices and difficulty. If you were to invest $750 into ETH you could buy 2.84 at $280 per ETH. and maybe the price will double but the only way you will have made any money buying ETH is if you got it at 280 and it jumps to 600 or so, now I totally think thats possible but in the same amount of time you would have been mining more ETH with genesis for the same amount of money.
I just mine with what hardware I currently have. I use my gaming pc to make me a little money on the side, so I did not build it to just "mine"