Eobot After the Halving: Cloud Mining Income Fell Fivefold
On Saturday, July 9, a long-awaited and not very pleasant event for miners took place: the reward for finding a Bitcoin block was cut in half!
The reward cut (the halving) is built into the Bitcoin algorithm and happens every 210,000 blocks, roughly every 4 years. This time, at block 420,000, the reward dropped from 25 to 12.5 BTC. The first halving was on November 28, 2012, when the reward fell from 50 to 25 BTC.
For cloud mining it’s a blow: most contracts have become unprofitable :-(
What happened to my Eobot contract
Those who invested recently will most likely not even get their money back, let alone make a profit.
Here’s a real example. I have 274 GH/s of an Eobot Cloud SHA-256 3.0 contract: I mined a little on a free account, bought more for 3 ETH and added what I mined over a couple of days. By the way, the 3.0 contract runs for 5 years!
Before the halving it brought in $0.25 a day, and now only $0.05. Five times less!
Why five times and not two? The halving cuts mining output exactly in half, but maintenance and electricity fees are also deducted from it. Output fell while costs stayed the same, so very little is left over. Older contracts have become completely unprofitable and were closed.
Update 14.07.2016: Cloud SHA-256 4.0
Eobot seems to be trying to come up with something to win back interest in the service, despite the huge drop in returns.
They are introducing a Cloud SHA-256 4.0 contract. It’s not yet clear how long it runs or how much it will earn. Today I was offered mining power for one day, and I took it for pennies, but it’s just not the same anymore.
Meanwhile, the cloud mining service HashFlare announced that it had spent several months preparing for the drop in returns: it is installing new, more energy-efficient SHA-256 hardware and promises to keep BTC mining profitable. The maintenance and electricity fee for SHA-256 contracts was cut by 25%, from $0.008 to $0.006 per 10 GH/s.
That’s good news, of course, but do the math: for the same 274 GH/s at HashFlare the fee was about $0.22 a day, and it will be about $0.16. That’s still most of what this much power mines after the halving.
Is cloud mining worth investing in now?
My answer: not really. Before buying any contract, check:
- Payback, taking difficulty into account. Network difficulty keeps growing, so the same power earns less every month.
- The next halving. If the contract runs for 5 years, the reward will be cut in half again during that time.
- The maintenance fee. It doesn’t depend on the price or output and can eat up all the income.
- Termination terms. What happens to the contract when it becomes unprofitable: is it paused, closed, is the money returned?
- A simple alternative. Compare how many bitcoins you’ll get over 5 years with how many you could buy with the same money today.
That’s how things are.
What happened next
In July 2018, HashFlare stopped mining on SHA-256 contracts, citing unprofitability. In 2025, the HashFlare founders pleaded guilty in a US court to conspiracy to commit wire fraud; more in my post about my HashFlare experience and how it ended. The eobot.com website no longer works either.
If you want to invest in bitcoin, it’s simpler to buy coins directly on an exchange, for example on Binance (affiliate link). Crypto prices swing wildly: only invest what you can afford to lose.