Cloud mining without your own hardware: $35.60 per petahash a day before fees

The record shows this: Binance is discontinuing Binance Pool together with Pool Savings, Cloud Mining and the Transaction Accelerator on November 10, 2026 at 07:00 UTC; hash rate and shares submitted after that point will no longer be accepted, processed or credited, according to the announcement of October 13, 2026. One of the large routes into mining without your own hardware thus disappears. Our assessment follows further down: a cloud mining contract is a bet on two variables the buyer does not influence, and its return can be calculated before the purchase.

The short answer to the question in the headline: on the arithmetic, bought hash rate currently earns so little that fees and contract term decide between profit and loss, not the Bitcoin price alone. Our older article on Bitcoin mining without your own hardware dates from February 2020, from a time with a quarter of today's network hash rate and four times the block reward. The sum has shifted in both directions since then, and today it comes out stricter.

Binance switches off Pool, Cloud Mining and the Transaction Accelerator on November 10, 2026

The exchange announced the shutdown on October 13, 2026 and described it as part of a product review. Affected are the mining pool itself, the Pool Savings product, the cloud mining offering and the Transaction Accelerator, along with the hash rate notifications and the pool's interface. The stratum addresses go offline on the cut-off date. If you point devices at this pool, aim them at another one beforehand, otherwise the hash rate runs into nothing.

A second point applies to Pool Savings customers: open positions generate no further earnings after the cut-off date, and the exchange does not unwind them automatically. Which deadlines apply in detail and in what order they run out, we set down in our report on the Binance Pool shutdown on November 10. The exchange says it will keep the pool's overview page running for a few days beyond the cut-off date so that settlements remain visible.

A provider that discontinues a product is making a statement about that product. Cloud Mining was one of the smaller-volume offerings at Binance; when a house of that size stops running the business, that is a data point for assessing the entire product category.

What separates cloud mining from pool mining and hosting

Three routes lead into mining, and only one requires no hardware of your own. With pool mining the devices are yours, they sit at your place, and the pool merely bundles your hash rate with that of others so that payouts arrive regularly rather than at random. With hosting, also called colocation, you buy the devices and place them in someone else's data centre, which supplies power, cooling and maintenance and charges rent for it. With cloud mining you buy nothing tangible, but a contract covering a certain amount of hash rate for a certain time.

The difference is considerable in legal and economic terms. On the first two routes you have a device with a residual value that you can sell. On the third you have a claim against a provider, and its worth depends on that provider delivering, settling and paying. Should the provider fail, the contract is worthless, and there is no device you could stand against the wall.

A fourth route avoids mining altogether: to bet on the economics of mining, you can buy shares in mining companies or exchange-traded products on them. A separate section below covers that.

The hash price: what one petahash per second currently earns in a day

The most important figure in cloud mining is the hash price. This value states what one unit of hash rate earns gross per day, and it can be worked out from three public quantities. First the block reward: since the fourth halving it stands at 3.125 Bitcoin per block, and the network finds 144 blocks a day on average, so 450 Bitcoin daily from new issuance. Second the network hash rate, which stood at around 1,034 exahash per second on October 22, 2026, as recorded at mempool.space. Third the price, which stood at about $81,800 that day.

Those three numbers give the sum: 450 Bitcoin times $81,800 comes to roughly $36.8 million that the whole network takes in from new issuance in a day. Spread across 1,034 exahash per second, that leaves around $35,600 per exahash per day. One exahash is a thousand petahash, one petahash is a thousand terahash. So one petahash per second comes to about $35.60 a day, and one terahash to about 3.6 cents. Transaction fees come on top, though in normal operation they account for only a small single-digit percentage.

That figure is the yardstick for every offer. A contract for 100 terahash per second earns roughly $3.56 a day gross, so about $1,300 a year. From that come the provider's maintenance and power fees, usually stated in the contracts per terahash per day. If that fee sits anywhere near 3.6 cents per terahash, nothing is left for the buyer, whatever the advertising promises. So anyone holding a prospectus first sets the fee against the hash price, and only then looks at everything else.

Difficulty and hash rate: why the sum has to be redone every two weeks

The hash price is no constant, and it tends to fall. Mining difficulty sees to that: the Bitcoin network adjusts it every 2,016 blocks, roughly every two weeks, so that a block again takes ten minutes on average. On October 22, 2026 it stood at around 140.58 trillion. As the network hash rate rises, difficulty rises with it, and the share of the whole network held by a fixed amount of bought hash rate shrinks.

The next adjustment was due at the end of October; estimates for it recently ranged between 4.5 percent from our own measurement on October 22 and 6.4 percent according to our report of October 21. Both values are projections from block speed and change up to the cut-off. The direction this year is unambiguous, though: across the recent adjustments, difficulty rose by around six percent several times.

That produces a mechanism many offers do not explain. A cloud mining contract sells a fixed amount of hash rate, not a fixed share of the network. If the network grows by ten percent, the return on the same contract falls by just under ten percent, even with the price unchanged. If the price does not keep pace with the growth in network hash rate, the daily return sinks over the contract term, regardless of the provider and of the quality of the hardware.

Added to that is the second variable with a fixed date: the next halving cuts the block reward from 3.125 to 1.5625 Bitcoin. On October 22, 2026 the block height stood at 972,617, and the halving falls on block 1,050,000, around 77,400 blocks later. At ten minutes per block that is about 537 days, so spring 2028 on this calculation. A contract running beyond that point loses half its gross income on that day, provided price and fees stay unchanged.

Contract traps in cloud mining: term, maintenance fee and the shutdown clause

Four clauses decide whether a contract leaves any chance of profit at all. The term sets how long you share in the return; if it runs past a halving, that belongs in your own sum. The maintenance or power fee is deducted per unit of hash rate per day, often in dollars or cents per terahash; it is the one figure that stands directly against the hash price. The shutdown clause allows the provider to end the contract if the return fails to cover the fee over a certain period. And the payout threshold determines the amount from which anything is paid out at all.

The shutdown clause is the most unpleasant, because it bites precisely when the buyer least expects it. If the price falls or difficulty rises sharply, the daily return slips below the fee. The provider then discontinues the contract, and the purchase price paid is spent. The risk therefore sits with the buyer alone, although the buyer has no influence over operations.

A fifth disclosure is missing from many prospectuses entirely: which hardware is used, at what efficiency. Without it there is no way to check whether the stated fee fits the power costs the provider actually has. A contract that names neither device type nor location nor power price therefore cannot be recalculated, and what cannot be recalculated cannot be compared.

Signs of a dubious cloud mining provider

Several signs can be checked independently of the provider and need no specialist knowledge. A fixed return figure in percent per day or month does not fit the business: mining returns depend on price and difficulty and cannot be promised. If company name, registered office and commercial register entry are missing, so is the counterparty against whom a claim would be directed. A referral programme that pays more for recruiting new customers than the mining itself earns shifts the source of income from mining to the inflow of new payers.

Two further points can be checked in minutes. First: does the provider give verifiable data on location, hardware and power tariff, or does it stop at pictures of halls? Second: can the hash rate it claims to run be found again in the distribution of blocks found? The shares of the large pools are publicly visible, and a provider claiming a three-digit number of petahash without appearing there is either running that hash rate through another pool or not at all.

In Germany there is a supervisory question on top. If a mining contract is offered with a fixed promise of return and no decision-making power for the buyer, it may constitute an investment product subject to prospectus and licensing requirements. BaFin publishes warnings about providers without authorisation; a look at those publications belongs before any contract is signed.

Mining shares and ETPs as a route without your own hardware

To share in the economics of mining without buying hash rate, you can acquire stakes in companies that mine. These shares are tradable on German exchanges and accessible through any broker; our crypto broker comparison gives an overview of costs and trading venues. The difference from cloud mining is tangible: a share is a stake in a company with a balance sheet, reporting duties and a market price, while a mining contract is a claim against a provider.

In exchange, a mining share carries risks the Bitcoin price does not explain: debt, power contracts, site risks, dilution through new shares, and the company's decision to hold or sell what it has mined. Mining shares have historically swung harder than Bitcoin itself, in both directions. Alongside them sit exchange-traded products on Bitcoin and on baskets of miners; which of those are accessible in Germany and how they differ is collected in our overview of crypto ETFs in Germany.

The most honest comparison remains the one with buying directly. Buy Bitcoin outright and you pay a trading fee once and then carry the price risk alone. Buy hash rate instead and you carry the price risk as well, plus the risk of rising difficulty, the provider's fees and the counterparty's risk of failure. Three additional risks have to be covered by an advantage, and that advantage sits in the sum further up.

Tax in Germany: mining income, the exemption threshold and the holding period after it

Mining income is taxable in Germany, and taxable at the moment it accrues, valued at the market price on that day. Where someone mines privately on a small scale, the income regularly falls under other income, for which an exemption threshold of 256 euros per calendar year applies. Where the operation is run on a sustained, systematic and profit-seeking basis, the tax authorities classify it as a business, and then trade tax, bookkeeping and the rules for business assets apply. When that threshold is crossed is broken down in detail in our article on crypto mining and tax.

For the later sale of the mined Bitcoin, private holdings fall under the one-year period of section 23 of the Income Tax Act, with an exemption threshold of 1,000 euros per calendar year for all private disposal transactions together. So there are two events: first the accrual, then the sale. Both need their own record with date, quantity and price. With a cloud mining contract this bookkeeping weighs especially heavily, because payouts often arrive daily in small amounts; valuing every credit individually is not feasible without a tool, and for that there is our crypto tax tool comparison.

One note for context: these statements describe the rules as they stand and are no substitute for advice in an individual case. How a contract is treated for tax purposes depends on how it is specifically structured, and a classification as a business changes the sum fundamentally.

Our assessment: a cloud mining contract is a bet on price and difficulty

From this newsroom's point of view, what argues against the product is above all our own sum further up. At around $35.60 gross per petahash per day, the margin from which the provider's fee and the buyer's profit both have to be paid lies in the range of cents per terahash. Add to that a difficulty that rose by around six percent several times across the recent adjustments, and a halving in spring 2028 that halves gross income per block. That a house the size of Binance is discontinuing this offering as of November 10, 2026 fits the picture, even if the exchange itself speaks only of a product review.

In favour there is a narrow case: someone with access to unusually cheap power who cannot use it themselves, and who finds a contract with a traceable fee, named hardware and a short term, can share in a rising price more strongly that way than by buying directly. That case is rare, and it demands the sum beforehand. Where the sum cannot be drawn up because the prospectus names neither fee nor hardware nor location, there is no contract to recalculate, only a promise.

A total loss is possible with cloud mining, by two routes: through a price fall that pushes the return below the fee and triggers the shutdown clause, and through the provider's failure. None of this is a recommendation to buy or to abstain; the figures above are the basis on which each person decides for themselves.

Cloud mining: without the fee and the hash price in the contract, the sum is missing

1. Work out the hash price yourself for the day of your decision: 144 blocks times the block reward times the price, divided by the network hash rate. If the provider's fee sits anywhere near that value, the contract settles itself. If you would rather buy directly, the routes are in the comparison of Bitcoin savings plans.
2. Check term, maintenance fee, shutdown clause and payout threshold in the contract text, and note whether the term reaches past the halving in spring 2028. If one of those is missing, the basis for comparison is missing. Trading venues and fees for the simpler route are in the crypto exchange comparison.
3. Decide before the first payout where the payments go and how you record them. For custody outside an exchange you need a key only you know; the devices for that are compared in our overview of hardware wallets.

(As of October 22, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)