Hashrate Rental
Hashrate rental is buying somebody else's computing power and pointing it at your pool. You do not end up with an asic of your own.
What hashrate rental is
The mechanics are simple. A marketplace has people renting out the power of their asics and people taking it. You pay for terahashes for a period, give the address of your pool, and shares start arriving there from somebody else's hardware. The reward, if a block is found, goes to your pool and to you.
Rental prices follow the price of hash and usually sit above it. That makes sense: whoever rents power out wants no less than he would have earned on his own. So there is no built in gain in renting, and waiting for one is pointless.
Where renting really earns its keep is in testing. Trying an unfamiliar pool at real hashrate, checking your own payout settings or watching how PPLNS behaves comes cheaper through rental than through buying an asic.
The risks are its own. You do not control somebody else's hardware and cannot see its condition, the rental period is short, and the price changes every hour. There is nothing here to build a long bet on.
Quick reference table
| What you buy | somebody else's power for a period |
| Where the shares go | to the pool you name |
| Price | follows the price of hash, usually above it |
| What you do not get | hardware of your own and its resale value |
| Where it helps | testing a pool and your settings |
What to look at
Work out the full price per terahash per day and compare it with the current price of hash. If renting costs more, you are paying the difference for convenience rather than earning it.
Check that your pool accepts rented hashrate and how it counts it. Under PPLNS a short rental gives less than it looks like it should, because the window never fills up.
Set up a separate worker for the rental. Otherwise you will not separate your own statistics from the rented ones and will not know what you actually tested.
Do not confuse rental with cloud mining. With a rental you see the hashrate at your own pool and can check it, while cloud schemes show you nothing but an account page.
An example of the logic
You want to compare two pools on your own settings, but there is no spare asic. Renting 200 TH/s for a day gives both pools the same load, and a day later you have figures instead of opinions. Buying an asic for a test like that would be strange, while a day of rental costs about as much as lunch.
Related terms
Where to go next on the site
Numbers
Hardware
- ASIC Miner knowledge base
Coins
- Bitcoin coins
Questions and answers
Can you make money renting hashrate
Not systematically: rental prices follow the price of hash and usually sit above it. The tool is useful for testing rather than as a source of income.
How does rental differ from cloud mining
With a rental the shares arrive at your pool and you see it yourself. In cloud schemes there is nothing to check apart from the account page of the seller.
Does rented hashrate count as yours under PPLNS
It does, but a short rental has no time to fill the window of the last N shares, so the result comes out below expectations.
How the terms connect
Every link in the chain is clickable. Orange marks where you are now.
Looking for an ASIC miner
The catalog holds 212 models. You can compare them by hashrate and by joules per terahash, then plug your own rate into the calculator and see what stays in your pocket.
Page written and checked by Denys Klimchuk. Updated .