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That place sells GHS for bitcoins. At the moment it's 0.0448 BTC for each GHS you buy.

What I want to know is, how long do you buy it for? It's not anywhere on the site. Do I keep it for a month? A year? What?

At the time of this post, 9:30AM, Friday, January 3 2014, PST, this is about $37 per GHS.

I pay them the amount, and it starts mining for me. But it's not clear how long.  Any ideas?

It`s mining for you how long you like.Until you sell the Ghs for BTC.

It's mining forever, but there's a catch: maintenance fee (electricity and labor)
At 0.0448 BTC for each GHS, minus pool fees, minus maintenance fee, you'll never be able to make that much in less than three years (if not forever)

Thanks.
How many GHS would I need to buy to actually be in profit?

IMO with recent prices it's just not worth it.

You can't be in profit.
Even if you use their calculator you can see that's impossible
It's impossible to make in profit until one GHS = 0.01 BTC

Really, let's use their calculator: https://cex.io/calc
I buy 100 GHS for 4.49 BTC
After one year I make the staggering sum of... 2.83 BTC... not to mention that after ten months the maintenance fee will be higher than the generated bitcoins, meaning you start to lose money

Thank you. I guess I'll scrap that idea. I wanted to order a monarch card from BFL but by the time they deliver it, the 600ghs will probably not be enough given the rise in difficulty.

it's more about selling your GHS back to profit.

Basically, for the average small scale investor (<10k USD) it's never worth to invest in mining, in my opinion.
However, buying the ghash/s on cex.io is still the cheapest and most comfortable way if you want to mine.
Still, you won't make any profit usually. Here's why:
a) People buy Ghash/s on cex.io and the price rises a bit
b) The bitcoin difficulty rises according to the purchases on cex.io since they add hashing power obviously
c) you'll thus mine less than before, thus the price people want to pay per ghash/s is lowering
d) you now have your mining profit, but a lower price per ghash/s and a lower future revenue

The only thing that would offset this is a rising Bitcoin price, but if you think the bitcoin price will rise it's obviously better to just buy bitcoins at the current price than to mine them.
Mining is only profitable under certain circumstances (special hardware, which not anybody can obtain, or free electricity).
Basically, if you don't have anything to offer that a lot of other people have as well, don't bother (albeit, that goes for every investment, but especially for mining).

I don't know why people don't seem to get it, it's simple logic but yet they don't understand. Please point out whats so hard about it.
Thanks a lot for reading, bye.

That requires people foolish enough to pay more for the GH/s than you did. Unfortunately, it seems that there are plenty of those.

Here is the stupid part:

cex.io doesn't even have to mine. Right now, the price of 1 GH/s is about 0.044 BTC, but 1 GH/s will probably mine less than a total of 0.02 BTC due the rising difficulty. When they sell GH/s for 0.044 BTC, all they have to do is reserve 0.02 BTC for mining payments, and they can keep the rest for themselves.

I believe that cex.io has not added short-selling to their platform because they can sell all the GH/s they want for no cost. They don't want short-sellers coming in and taking a big chunk of their profits.

But they must predict very well the difficulty increases in next half year, or it will not work. Like if the difficulty stop rising, they will have to pay more Bitcoins than customers sent them

tl;dr above
Just buy bitcoin and hodl ;D
do some research on bfl if you have second thought of buying from them ;)

Its a hobby investment for long term, otherwise You'll end up making others big profits.

Is why I'm buying Antminer U1's and block erupters as cheap as I can find them  :)

I think making your investment back will be hard for a looong while

Just buy bitcoin from localbitcoins directly. You can profit that way. It is still relatively low price at the moment. It will be over $1000 next week.

You are right that they have to predict the difficulty, but they don't have to predict very well because cex.io miners predict so badly. Since cex.io started, the cex.io buyers have been buying at a price that predicts a rise in the difficulty of 10% - 15% each period, when the actual values have been 20% - 45%.

You would expect cex.io buyers to be good at predicting the difficulty because their profits depend on it. But they aren't. They suck.

Two weeks ago, it was 0.085 BTC for a GHS

Theoretically "investors" would profit from selling GHS when they rise in the price.
The problem is that GHS will never rise in price: the difficulty is rising and with new powerful miners coming, they'll become even more worthless.

It's a great way to make money only if you are a referral and you trick others that it's a great way to make money.

You can read this topic: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=378439.0

And use this calculator: http://mining-profit.com/

Good luck :)