That being said, I'm not here to recommend you go start mining. If you are actually considering it, I just want to throw some numbers on there through some quick first-hand research. You still need to go out into the world, little minnow, and figure out for yourself if mining is the path you want to take.
This is a quick comparison of cloud-based ether mining comparing two cloud offerings:
First, I want to describe Amazon AWS. It's the largest player in the traditional cloud space. They have a huge selection of different virtual machines that you can purchase for different use-cases.
For this experiment, I chose their p2 series which is categorized under Accelerated Compute Instances. This is also the only series of VMs that has GPUs in it (NVIDIA). I'm using Claymore's pool miner to run hashing algorithms to mine Ethereum. Definitely, you could use different things that can produce different hashrates so definitely this is a limited perspective on the performance potential of AWS in crypto-mining use cases. But overall, I think you'll still find it very expensive with negative ROI. Why? Because Amazon AWS's GPU VMs weren't built for you to exploit crypto-mining with!
P2 Series: P2 instances are intended for general-purpose GPU compute applications. High-performance NVIDIA K80 GPUs, each with 2,496 parallel processing cores and 12GiB of GPU memory.
At $0.9 per hour, that's around $7,900 per year
Yea, you read that right. That's because HashMining takes payment in Bitcoin. That reminds me of the 10,000 BTC pizza story because you have to account for the potential growth in BTC.
This is because the price of Bitcoin has grown 4.044x YTD. Comparatively, though... Looking at HashMining's estimated charts, the potential money you could make over the course of the year is only 797.28 Euros, or about $888.
So some questions arise in your mind: Will Bitcoin rise in price again by 4x over the course of the next year? Will Ethereum prices (or other currencies that you are attempting to mine) drop over that year, too? Will it increase?
If you decide to play the cloud-mining game with HashMining, you need to consider not just how much you spend today, but what the spend could mean a year from now. The estimated revenue is misleading because there's no guarantee that the prices of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will remain the same.
Best of luck on your wild-west Cryptocurrency Adventures!
I'll try to describe each thing in the most ELI5 way I know how.
MH/s: Megahashes per second. Basically, how fast your computer is at mining cryptocurrency. The higher the number, the better.
VM: Virtual machine. Oh boy, this is tough... Just think of it as a computer but it's not sitting in front of you, it is somewhere else but you can still control it remotely. Well, it doesn't have to be somewhere else... But in this case, it is.
Cloud: I'm really starting to regret making this section. Cloud is... Anything you access over the internet, basically. So you can remotely access your VM (remember, the computer that you can control but doesn't have to be right in front of you) through the internet to install a miner on it.
Cryptocurrency/Ethereum/Bitcoin: Seriously?? Omg I give up.
