This year has seen the arrival of a number of “cloud” mining services - companies that will sell you mining contracts and pay you out with the proceeds. Generally, this means you’re renting mining hardware directly, and you get paid out with whatever that hardware producers.
Genesis Mining is a bit different, in that you don’t rent the hardware directly. Instead, you get a contract for a set amount of hashing power, which you can target against various alt-coins like DarkCoin, LiteCoin, etc. At the end of the day, Genesis Mining converts your mining efforts back into Bitcoins and pays out into your own wallet.
The site has a nice dashboard that lets you allocate your hashing power to one or more alt-coins, or just set it to auto and they’ll calculate the most profitable coin to mine for you.
