Although I'm skeptical about buying or hiring hash power, I decided to try out some contracts. Almost a year ago I invested some money in three lifetime bitcoin mining contracts with Genesis, Hashflare and Hashnest.
I do wonder why those companies sell their hash power when they can obtain a full return of investment within a year? If it is just to obtain funding I am sure there must be more profitable ways to obtain this!
On Cryptocompare.com for many contracts the current payback times are published. Typical payback times are between 100 days and one year. These payback times are much better than the payback times I am experiencing.
By today I have received 38%(Genesis), 48%(Hashflare) and 72% (Hashnest) of my initial investment back. The payback times for these contracts are obviously more than a year.
The only explanation I can think of is that Cryprocompare focusses on the current weekly pay-outs. The current weekly pay-out for a certain amount of hashpower however is likely to decrease when in the future total hashpower increases and as a result the difficulty increases.
It must be said however that my return on investment is calculated from an initial investment in BTC and my received payments in BTC. If I calculated my original investment in USD and my return on investment also in USD the general picture would be much better because over the past year the value of the bitcoin went up from 600 USD to 2900 USD. I prefer to calculate in BTC because I invested BTC and if I had not bought the mining contracts I would have seen the value of my bitcoins go up just as well.
If anyone has interesting experiences with mining contracts please share them with us!