Cryptsy Mining Contact 2 review: The simplest way to mine bitcoin?

Bitcoin mining contacts require significant amounts of risk: price fluctuation, counterparty risk (i.e. your cloud miner could shut down or fail to deliver as promised) and dramatic increases in difficulty rates. All of those factors make something like Cryptsy‘s Mining Contract 2 appealing.

How Cryptsy’s Mining Contact 2 works

You simply buy a share of Cryptsy’s Mining Contact 2 (MN2) on their open exchange and that entitles you to the daily payout from 0.01 TH/s (or 10 GH/s) of mining power. At the moment, shares of MN2 are trading for roughly $74. When I calculated the daily payout from 0.01 TH/s of mining power here, I see that at current difficulty rates, you can expect your share of MN2 to pump out about $0.28 USD a day (paid out in bitcoin directly to your Cryptsy account).

If nothing changed, you’d get your original investment back in 264 days. However, there are two additional factors to consider. First, let’s look at the negative one: the difficulty level for bitcoin mining is trending up, and that’s a trend that’s expected to continue. That means your payouts could drop by about 7 percent (at current rates) every 1-2 weeks. On the positive side, your share of MN2 won’t stop paying out even after you’ve made back 100 percent of your original investment. Also, if the price of bitcoin rises faster than the difficulty/payout, then you’ll make more money faster than you might have otherwise.

In some ways, MN2 can act like an interest-bearing account for your otherwise dormant BTC over short periods of time (i.e. a week). Buy into MN2, then sell it before the price drifts down as the bitcoin mining difficulty increases. It’s not going to get you rich, but if you can enter and exit MN2 at the same price, you could capture some simple gains. In many ways, it’s the easiest way to start bitcoin mining that I’ve come across so far. Learn more at Cryptsy.

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