What’s the deal with renting hashpower to Nicehash or teaming up with Binance CM?

I've noticed some folks renting out their mining rigs or selling hashrate to others via Nicehash. Strangely enough, I’ve even seen tools like whattomine.com suggesting Nicehash for better mining returns. On top of that, Binance is into cloud mining too, working with actual miners and laying down some guidelines for them. Binance claims that cloud mining is a solid way to earn, just like Nicehash does. So I’m curious, why would anyone go through the trouble of buying mining gear, setting it up in a secure data center, and managing all the headaches of running a mining operation just to rent out their hashrate? Isn’t it usually better to mine on your own?

I am not experienced in mining, but if I have to take a guess why someone would donate their hashrate to a bigger pool is to increase their chance of making a profit. As a solo miner you are in a very competitive market, up against big mining rigs, it makes a bit of sense to pool hashrates together, raising the chances of confirming the next block and then share the reward. Cloud mining without any mining equipment should be discouraged. - Jay -

There are many reasons why people choose to invest and Cloud mining than buying their own miners. The first thing is the electricity rate if you have high electricity costs and own mining equipment you won't make any profit you won't make any profit because mining machines are power-hungry. And the 2nd thing is people do not want to maintain them because they don't want much hassle maintaining them due to a lack of knowledge. And there are lots of factors why people choose to buy hash rate than owning a miner like scalability and risk management, etc.

2 Different things going on. 1) Pointing your miners to Nicehash (or mining rig rentals or a few other places) although they charge a large fee, NH does have profitability spikes when someone comes out with the next big alt coin and people want to mine it and they don't have miners so they rent. Also, NH and others support a bunch of different algorithms. So if you have some SHA256 miners and some Scrypt miners and some old ETH miners and so on you just point them at NiceHash and you are not dealing with a bunch of different pools. 1a) Renting form nice hash. Kind of like playing the lottery. If you are pointing to a solo pool or PPNLS pool you *might* get lucky and come out ahead. Or you may loose. That is your risk. 2) Places like Binance. They are making money on the hosting and so on. But if they 'rent' you a cloud miner they don't care if BTC goes up they don't care if BTC goes down. They don't care if the pool is lucky. They have your money. You are now taking the risk. -Dave

Did you read my post? If cloud mining is so good, then why don't mining equipment owners sell their rigs and invest in cloud mining? Why does someone come up with an idea to buy an equipment and do all the time-consuming job to offer hashrate with profitable terms to someone in the name of cloud mining? Imagine, you buy a mining equipment and host them in datacenter, are taking care of things and manage your mining rigs. Why will you rent your hashrate to someone else and at the same time tell him that he will profit this way? Won't it be beneficial to just join the pool and mine on your? There are so many benefits listed in favor of cloud mining, it looks questionable why would someone provide a rig for cloud mining.