How cloud mining brought BTC mining back to people

Five years ago, you’d still meet people running six or eight Antminers in their garage and actually making money doing it. That doesn’t really happen anymore unless you live beside a hydropower dam, paying something like three cents per kilowatt-hour. Difficulty blew past 100 trillion, the block reward slid to 3.125 BTC, and a new efficient miner now costs about as much as a used pickup truck. For regular people, home mining basically flatlined. Cloud mining stepped in and, almost quietly, reshaped the whole landscape.

The idea is as straightforward as it sounds. Large companies build massive facilities equipped with the latest gear, negotiate low electricity rates, and rent out chunks of hash rate. You buy a small contract—maybe a terahash, maybe a hundred petahash—pay with a credit card or BTC, and the payouts land in your wallet each day after power and maintenance fees. No fan noise, no tripped breakers, no sweating over your utility bill. Just the rewards.

Everything really pivoted around mid-2021, when China shut down mining practically overnight. The network lost more than half its hash rate in a matter of weeks. Instead of ending up back in garages, most of those rigs migrated to places like Texas, Kentucky, Quebec, and Kazakhstan. They went into warehouses run by operators who were either already public or soon planned to be. Those firms realized they could mine part of their racks and rent out the rest to anyone with a credit card. Marathon (NASDAQ: MARA), Riot (NASDAQ: RIOT), Core Scientific (NASDAQ: CORZ), Bitdeer (NASDAQ: BTDR)—before long, almost every major miner rolled out a cloud product.

By the end of 2024, North America was approaching 40% of the global hash rate, up from almost nothing a few years earlier. Somewhere around 14 to 18% of the entire network now comes from cloud contracts owned by individuals. Before the China ban, it was maybe 3 to 5%. And with cloud service rates hovering around four cents per kilowatt-hour, it’s no wonder. Try finding that at home in Germany or California—you’ll pay ten times that, easily.

The services have kept evolving. Some let you choose the type of power source. Others allow you to trade mining contracts on decentralized exchanges before they expire. A handful rent hash rate by the hour, similar to renting cloud GPUs. Mining is gradually becoming something you can toggle on and off, like any subscription.

There’s also a side effect nobody predicted: for many small holders, cloud mining feels a bit like staking without actually using a proof-of-stake chain. You lock in a contract, receive daily rewards, and if the price runs up, your exposure is already in place. It’s not the same as running hardware yourself, but it keeps thousands of people involved in securing the network rather than just buying coins and forgetting about them.

Looking ahead to the 2028 halving, when rewards fall to 1.5625 BTC, the public mining giants will feel severe pressure on their least efficient sites. Cloud users, meanwhile, will be transitioned to more affordable facilities or upgraded to the next generation of the S21 line. They won’t need to remortgage their house to stay involved, extend the contract, and keep going.

The machines themselves haven’t changed much. They’re still loud, hot, and hungry. What has changed is who gets to participate. A nurse in Argentina, a student in Lagos, a mechanic in Romania—anyone can now access the same efficiency as a Wall Street operation without shipping a single box. The network is more geographically spread out, harder for any one government to choke off, and finally open again to people who don’t own industrial power stations.

Cloud mining didn’t resurrect the 2016 era of GPUs running in spare bedrooms. But it did bring mining back to everyday people.

Watch: Untangling Bitcoin mining at the CoinGeek Weekly Livestream