https://www.cex.io/guide?start - you'll need to have some bitcoins or litecoins or something along that line to get started.

A lot of people who believe in bitcoin potential advise exactly that.

It does feel like mining itself is less speculative than hoarding and has some positive value to it.

prolom.

You would probably break even and make a profit in terms of dollars or other government currency. As far as bitcoins it is questionable - depends on the hardware hitting the market.

That was very informative although I would need to learn more about the trading jargon (massive volume on no news, non-matching buy/sell graphs ? etc.). "Keep-it-up" algos and API tradebots - I suppose those are different types of bots doing opposite things.

Speaking of competitive sellers of GHs - do you have any recommendations at all?

Thanks again and Happy New Year guys!

prolom.

Thank you. I don't know what you mean by selling physical goods.

There seams to be some behind the scene maneuvering over there but for a person new to trading it's hard to tell what's going on.

Happy New Year!

prolom.

Litecoin mining is still profitable on home rigs (try to buy a Radeon R9 280x anywhere) and it's exchange rate against Bitcoin has been stable for a while.

prolom

I only recently started researching it and from what I gather from the posts on this forum and the cex.io chat is that it is regarded as a daytrading platform rather than a mining platform. So people (and bots) try to buy lower and sell higher. Overall trend is obviously down because they trade in GHs and a GH produces less and less coin as the difficulty increases, so the price falls. The common wisdom over there is that people who keep their GHs for a long term lose money. It looks like the majority of users lose money. It's a weird kind of market because they are trading in hash power of one company and it's partners and there seems to be no way to short sell GHs, plus the price is guaranteed to fall.

However the GH prices over there (at least when the "market" seems to drop) are better than most mining contracts you can find. And most mining contracts are sold by companies that seem to be extremely shady.

For instance on Dec 30th prices dropped to BTC0.035 per GH (~$27) while http://bit-mining.co (that's one company that seems to have at least some references, probably operated by a Canadian college student) sold a yearly contract for BTC0.05 (~$39) and cloudhashing.com (which was recently profiled in NYT) for $1000 for 10 GH yearly, ~BTC0.13 per GH. One mining contract vendor (that happens to be a hardware vendor as well - butterflylabs.com) is preselling $11 (~BTC0.014) per GH contracts but they don't know when those are going to actually start working. March-April if you are optimistic, by which time cex.io rates are very likely to reach that level. At cex.io you can at least sell the GH on an upswing, not be stuck with them for a year as they become worthless. And they are actually fully operational as we speak.

I wish there was a mining contract vendor that sold contracts priced based on the difficulty or something similar to that to take depreciation into account.

So... What's a guy without enough funds to buy a rack of asics to do? Maybe mine Litecoin...

prolom.

Thank you. I've been watching it and the price dipped quite a bit and rebounded a little. I was reading up on the candlestick charts so it makes a bit more sense now.

What doesn't make much sense is that unlike a stock market it looks like you can not short sell GHs. You can only make a profit if you buy lower and sell higher. Considering that GHS/BTC rate is guaranteed to decline it means that the vast majority of users is losing money. Although 0.035 BT per GH was probably not that bad of a price considering what mining contracts are being sold for at other companies.

It doesn't show a long term chart. Does the price dip after every difficulty increase?

Thanks,

prolom.

Thanks for your thoughtful reply, player01.

It makes sense that the market goes down as far as BTC per GH go because the generation of the BTC by those GH goes down rapidly. I was surprised how expensive those GHs were in the first place. And it's kind of weird to have a market based on one company's machines.

Which bots are you referring to? I admit I've never heard of bots in this context.

As far as the CEX.IO trading interface itself all I'm seeing is red and green bars flashing through the buy and sell orders and the numbers constantly changing. What is the best way to approach this? I know a bit about mining but trading is a completely different thing.

Thanks again,

prolom.

My understanding is that CEX.IO setup an exchange for the GH of their own hardware. So users sort of rent their hardware capacity for a certain price and buy/sell that capacity from/to other users who are interested in it. I first thought there was some kind of free exchange where you could sell your own capacity but it looks like people sell to each other time on CEX.IO rigs so to speak. It also looks incredibly expensive as far as mining goes. It looks like it's geared mostly for trading GHs.

Please enlighten me. Thanks in advance.

prolom.