I wondered about this and asked support: Ethereum might switch to PoS and one point in time. As no one knows if and when this happens, a fallback mechanism was added, so that you continue mining something useful.

In fact, the switch would be good in term of ROI, as 1 MH/s of Ether Mining is worth only 0.25 MH/s X11 (X11 is a more complicated algorithm). However, GM converts on a 1:1 ratio, which is very positive.

TL;DR: it is a good feature

Great job guys! Ethereum is the IMHO the second-most important crypto-currency. And if Bitcoin devs do not get the block size sorted out Ethereum evertually will become the most important one.

I do not agree. Last time I checked it was not possible to rent a rig for a year. And when the price for a coin goes up, so does the short-term price for renting. So ROI wise this is a bad deal.

With GM I have one price for a long period of time, independent of the price of the underlying coins. My X11 investment is going very well, so far - and I do not know any other service that even comes close to the offer of GM.

I am tracking their payouts for a long time, and found them to be reasonable (with slight variations, which are to be expected).

It helps if you back up your vague accusations with data: date, coin/algorithm, hashrate, maintenance fee.

It is well known that mining is risky. And so is Bitcoin. Thus, the same rule applies:

"do not invest more than you can afford to lose"

Everyone has his own expectations about the future and will act accordingly. My sha contract for example was profitable. I have invested recently some money in X11 because prices and hashrate are relatively stable and if this continues I will make a profit, as well.

Also with GM you have the option to mine different coins. By the way it would be great if you guys could add Ethereum, as well!

If price collapses or difficulty increases a lot your shares will be worthless anyway. It's an illusion to believe that you can mine, and then if mining goes bad you "just sell your shares". Also getting the hardware is useless for almost everyone, because of electricity cost, the extra heat, noise and not to forget "shipping costs".

If you urgently need the money it could be a benefit to sell. But in the first place you should not invest money that you might need anyway.

I like GM because of the multi-algo / multi-coin approach, and because they do a lot to boost the image of cryptos in the public.

Thanks for the information!

I have tracked the payouts of my X11 contracts so far.

X11 payout = payout in BTC (auto) times the Bitstamp rate at the end of the date.
ROI Ferix / Graviton = these is the amount I would have paid for each contract per day, so as long as I am above these lines I will make a profit.

Right now:

+16.8% for Ferix
+29.1% for Graviton!

https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMining/comments/3s5wmh/bitmain_has_misleading_s7_specs_be_careful/

It seems Bitmain is cheating a bit, as well.

On the other hand, which company is not?

If it is the only hot wallet. Someone I know is also mining with GM and he gets his payments from a different hot wallet.

Proofing the hashrate and the amount sold is difficult. There might be some fractional reserve mining here and there, however, I do not think that the more trustworthy ones are really doing it.

I have not followed all posts here, but GM has at least given me enough proof that they are real, endorsements from mining manufacturers (including spondolies IIRC) and videos (btw the GPU farm video is nice). On the other hand some people in the forum behave like idiots.

Wow! Great video!

Of course it would be "nice" from a client's perspective. On the other hand expecting them to leave the space unused for such an amount of time is not efficient either. As far as I remember they already mentioned somewhere that they are removing old miners and replacing them by new ones.

While I understand the point, you should expect that mining companies work very efficiently. Just leaving outdated stuff installed (in case it could come back) causes a lot of opportunity cost. So I would not have a lot of hope in this case.

Haha! What a great idea! 

Does Western Union like the campaign?   

See my points above. Payouts are in line with what you can expect. It is hardly GM's fault if X11 is doing a bit weaker at the moment. Let's see how this plays out in the long run.

My thoughts:

1) The X11 payouts of GM are in line with what you can expect according to other sites, e.g., nicehash. So GM payouts are in line with the market.

2) GM paid BTC 0.007066 in total for the first 26 days. So if the average stays the same, the total payout is about BTC 0.099, or about USD 28.3 by today's prices. That means a profit of 15%; and with a larger contract ($19 per MH/s) about 27% profit.

3) Calculation by today's Bitcoin prices: one MH/s diamond (the most efficient) costs $19, or BTC 0.0667.

Based on 26 days payouts: total income = BTC 0.0992   (expected profit of 49%)
Based on the 23,000 Satoshi: total income = BTC 0.084  (expected profit of 26%)

This means that the contracts would be very profitable. Of course this means that the attractiveness of X11 coins has to stay the same, but this is something everyone buying a X11 contract should know anyway.

I believe in the X11 coins (in particular the value of Dash), so I regret to not have upgraded before they stopped selling.

Bitcoin is not anonymous. The transaction history reveals a lot about addresses and connections between addresses.

Re-using addresses is bad from a security and anonymity point of view:
1) it reveals more about the owner of the address
2) when doing a transaction the public key of the address is revealed - this means that the additional protection layer by the hashing algorithm is gone

But forcing anything up on the user, is not the right way to do things. Wire transfers are less anonymous than cash, but still there are a lot of use cases why people prefer wires.

Too bad, I wanted to upgrade over the weekend. ROI wise it is an interesting product and Dash is a good X11 coin. Not too surprised to see that it is sold out

Any chance it will be back anytime soon?

Wrong conclusion. With rising difficulty payouts for home miners are dropping, as well.

Mining at home only makes sense if (i) you have free (or very cheap electricity) available and (ii) if you do not take into account the time you spend for setting up and maintaining the machine.

I think the price lacks one day; so the pricing on the previous day is relevant because they will probably do the BTC/USD conversion during that day. It could also be because the price is changing during the day, or pool luck could also play a role.