Bitcoin Forum

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I remember the contract stating that it could be cancelled if the maintenance fee exceeded the revenue, which is what happened.

I don't remember an obligation to buy new equipment.

Anyway, cex.io was a money-loser for investors from the beginning, and the shutdown simply realized all the future losses. I think that shutting down was a benefit to everyone. Before they turned off mining, people were paying far too much for GH/s -- much more than it would ever earn.

it is explicitly profitable, as long as it has exit strategy.
however, we should consider decrease the hash rate and/or separate the miners into independent pools due to the waste of energy.
cex should setup another mining farms for everyone to trade hashes and place it into the pools where they wished to.

I only bought a small portion of ghs from cex. So there I am not affected much by them.

Cex.io Doesn't loose any think.  But the losers are Investors.

I haven't really looked much into cloud mining(or mining at all for some time).

That sounds a lot like cex.io was a Ponzi. But I guess, their contract was solid enough to avoid a lawsuit.

Well, they definitely didn't chuck it in the bin.
I don't know how cex cloud mining works but from what I heard from others when you purchase mining equipment you can choose to mine there or have it shipped to you.
Do they not do that?

I have my doubt about the profitability of the mining process. Even the difficulty isn't going to high ultimately this process is profitable for sure for the owners of the mining pools or the clod mining pools but not sure for the simple users. It is for sure that for those last will not be profit when the difficulty will go normally high (as it goes normally the last years) but is not this the main problem. The very problem are the scammers. Mostly of the cloud mining sites are scammers. I participated on two of them and I lost bitcoins in both of them. I doubt that there are clod mining sites that are not scammers. And for this I think it is not profitable to go to them because will all probability the customers will lose their bitcoins instead of win. It is another problem to mine itself. Needed investments to buy hardware and needed money to pay electricity. And no one will know how long will last this profitable situation of not high difficulty. To many risks that tell me: don't mine.

they should at least repay their investors, if they are not willing to continue with the mining otherwise it may be seen as a scam, if this is not the case already...

it looks like from the beginning cex.io plans to use contract mining clients to build and do not give the results with the excuse that "the cost of maintance is much greater than in getting results"

cex was kind of a fail from the get go... However, is there any information on their hardware? On their location? The costs of running their operation?

Their fees were high and they probably run off with what they had in profit. But it's not impossible for a mine to cross the red unprofitability line nowadays. Not trying to defend them (or any cloud mining service for that matter), but do we have numbers, definitive proof of them simply running off? I never really investigated their service, but as far as I knew they were a big secretive operation hiding behind a pretty website.

Well at least they spelled it out upfront that they could basically stop mining in their sole discretion when it became unprofitable. Anyone using their service agreed to these terms, but I wonder how many actually bothered to read and understand them before buying. Many other sites were outright scams that just ran off with the money, I seem to remember some scrypt cloud service that disappeared after only a month. In the end I guess it is buyer beware.

I don't think they will pay a single satoshi. Look at MTGox, Mintpal, and all the rest of the scams that got away with it without paying a single coin back to the customers.

I am a butthurt CEX investor,

I almost went down with the ship lol! Luckily common sense prevailed and i sold all my GHS just before they shut down operations. Still took a huge loss of approx $500 on the whole deal. I bought GHS from them at the rate of 0.012/GHS and sold at 0.0012 i think! Since that was the time i was just getting into Bitcoin, i ended up buying a lot of GHS through ebay which was due to my ignorance, at huge premiums. I did manage to sell some of that GHS back on ebay too, so maybe it was not all that bad! Still $500 in the hole hurts me every time i think of it or someone posts about CEX :P.

The problem is it is up to their (cex.io) discretion which determines if it is unprofitable or not according to the terms people agreed to when signing up. Since it was a bit vague in that they gave no specifics, you are probably right in that they just made the decision which was most favorable to their self-interests.

To me the whole cloud mining didn't make a lot of sense in the first place. If these so called cloud miners were that profitable, they would simply keep it private and build their business up as the profits rolled in.