Mining or Scam? Hourly Mining Contracts Flood eBay

Led by the renewed interest in digital assets, eBay sellers offer contracts to mine various coins, showing worrying features.

The auctions site eBay is now hosting the new trend in crypto assets - the sale of small mining contracts. However, the nature of those deals raises questions, possibly pointing to a scam.

One of the deals promised the buyer to mine 0.25 Ethereum (ETH) for the price of $125. Basically, the contract sold ETH at almost double the price of $213.05. The seller did not even need to mine, but just send ETH to the buyer.

There is also another type of contract, which does not guarantee the production of coins. Mining by nature does not guarantee rewards, and the eBay buyer may end up just paying and hoping for a fraction of a coin. Especially in the case of Bitcoin (BTC), where the hashrate is near peak levels at 79 EH/s.

The third type of contract also basically sells obscure coins for a relatively high price. In the case of Dogecoin (DOGE), the catch is that 100 DOGE will cost $0.58 to mine through the contract. Additionally, DOGE is not mined separately, it is produced as a part of Litecoin (LTC) mining, one more red flag that the offer is a scam.

But buying on the open market may cost just $0.28. TRON mining contracts also exist, which is strange, given that TRX is not even a minable coin, but one produced by delegates. In any case, the buyer will acquire TRX at $0.027 per piece, while its market price is around $0.021.

Cloud mining offers picked up again in the past couple of months, as Bitcoin (BTC) started breaking out. Altcoins, however, lagged behind and to boost interest, various mining or staking schemes reappeared. Cloud mining is usually barely profitable, close to buying the actual coin, especially on very competitive networks.

There is yet another type of mining contract, in which the miners rent out their rigs, sending the potential rewards to the buyer of the contract. One such contract sells a year of ETH mining for about $700. This way, the rig’s owner would receive a guaranteed payout, while the buyer is stuck with the risk of never solving a block or earning even a fraction of ETH. For instance, a one-month rig rental runs at around $179 - but unfortunately, does not guarantee the production of nearly 1 ETH.

Currently, BTC mining is highly profitable, but also highly competitive. For altcoins, buying mining contracts is the worst possible path to owning actual assets, especially if the contracts are a borderline scam.