How to start mining/CEX.io

[pizzapi]

Hello All,

I'm totally new to bitcoin. I recently started mining. I don't have much in the way of hardware just a couple of machines with decent ATI cards that give me a few MH/s. I'm also kind of kicking myself for not doing this sooner. Former co-workers of mine were mining for years when it was alot easier and one of the made enough to buy a HUGE house out in Colorado recently.

Anyway, I'm not doing this to catch up, because that would be dumb and futile at this point. I am really interested in the movement and the currency. As such, I'm trying to figure out what the best way to started mining with some power is? Outside of buying one of these 600GH/s ASICs and whatever, is something like CEX a good way to get started? As I understand you can basically buy some GH/s for a period of time and use that to mine. Is that correct? Is it advisable for a newbie? Is that going to ever generate any significant amount of BTC or am I going to be wasting my money?

I have some money to put into this if that helps (I'm sure it does), just want to make sure that I'll be using it effectively and also starting at a point where I can learn more about everything and I'm not too in over my head.

Looking for some direction.

Sincerely,
Pizza Pi

[Probably]

You're jumping in a few steps deep, here's a quick quiz:

There are calculators around the web, that will help you predict, based on your hashing power, how much that hashing power will return.
This is not considering electricity costs, maintenance fees. This will also not consider mining fees and the payment structure if you use a pool or service.
My understanding is that CEX.io is not a good price for the power you get, and that there is some controversy around the actual pool that you're subscribing to, ghash.io. As far as I'm aware, mining returns require a lot of cash investment up front and still take a long time to return, if at all. That cash would be better spent simply buying the bitcoin. You could get a set of the low end asic miners http://www.ebay.com/itm/9-X-Block-Erupter-USB-Asic-Miner-Mine-Bitcoin-3GH-S-total-/271326536366?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3f2c5262ae (random link no idea if this is a good deal or who's it is, not mine) and use that as a starting point to see, with the aforementioned tools, what your ROI would be and when you could expect - if ever - to gain it. It will grant you some coins, so you could potentially invest at exchanges and play day trader a little bit. But probably not enough to purchase anything any time soon.  Of course all of this investment asserts guessing at future bitcoin value. If it goes up x10,000,000,000,000 then sure even the worst investments now are huge winners and being more careful with costs doesn't matter.


Quiz over. Do you understand everything I said? If not, read around the web until you do. Do you want to "invest" or is this an endeavor to fortify bitcoins (or a little of both?) There is a lot to learn about why it is valuable, how it works, and the various industries around them.