If we’re talking about pure Mining-as-a-Service (MaaS) I think it can be interesting for cryptos where us regular people don’t stand a chance of entering solo due to high costs (bitcoin is a great example here), however, there are some flaws if you think about the pure business model of it.
Simply put it becomes a way for the customer to enter mining but spreading the costs out over time. Meanwhile, a big premium would also be a stable platform that performs as expected.
However, I’m not sure I would see it as worth doing from the sellers point of view. Normally when you create some sort of platform as a service you take a hardware platform and sell shares of it to customers at an over allocated ratio. When it comes to more general workloads this is viable since applications almost never use up 100% of the underlying platforms resources. On top of that, you can normally utilize the fact that workloads run on high utilization at different hours of the day.
This is not the case with mining. Even though there are working solutions in virtualization today, allowing many users to share a single GPU platform, the allocation ratio (GPU/people) can’t go over 100% since it’s going to run at 100% 24 hours a day (if you have 2 users sharing a single GPU you can’t allocate 60% to each user as you do with more general workloads). Not being able to over allocate users to the platform leads to a price model that doesn’t give prices that are considerably lower than just buying the platform yourself.
It’s a fine line, and I’m not sure people would be interested enough to invest their money in a platform just because of stability.
Sorry for drifting away a little, but I hope I made some sense (the cloud nerd in me clearly didn’t stay at work where I usually work with stuff like this :P)
