Cloud mining is the process of cryptocurrency mining utilizing a remote datacenter with shared processing power.[1] This type of cloud mining enables users to mine bitcoins or alternative cryptocurrencies without managing the hardware. The mining rigs are housed and maintained in a facility owned by mining company and the customer simply needs to register and purchase mining contracts or shares.[2] Since cloud mining is provided as a service, there is generally some cost and this can result in lower returns for the miner.
A mining farm located in Iceland. The picture shows scrypt miners.
Users of hosted mining equipment can either lease a physical mining server or a virtual private server and install mining software on the machine. Instead of leasing a dedicated server, some services offer hashing power hosted in data centers for sale denominated in Gigahash/seconds (GH/s); users either select a desired amount of hashing power and a period for the contract or in some cases can trade their hashing power.
