So, in other words, you'd be loving any service that allows you to make money, regardless of how it operates? No matter that it could be a sort of pyramid scheme or something of that kind?
The 'cloud mining' services are evil. Period. If you care about bitcoins you hold, you should care about mining centralization too. These services centralize mining even more, I don't even mention ridiculous prices and absence of any guarantees that these GH/s even exist and aren't being used to perform malicious activity.
People should stop being narrow-minded and see a greater picture, not just look for a quick profit.
The moment you tell people why they "should be" or what they "should do", you lost the game. It's that simple. I do not care about you or your principles. I care about my small (business) profit. Period.
Do I care about bitcoins I hold? Yes. Not very much because I never spent any more than I can lose, but I still care, if just for the sake of amusement.
CEX.IO and Ghash.IO offer my small business a better ROI. If you have anything better, I am all ears.
Please, do tell me, why virtual GHs in any way worse than "real" GHs I run in my basement? Is the return lower? No.
YOUR PROBLEM is that you are trying to tell me what I "should do", instead of going and opening another cloud based service. In the world where every Bitcoin mining farm is a cloud based one, who has the "evil advantage"? Nobody.
To sum this up, CEX.IO offers the best deal for my business at this time. When something better comes along, I will consider it.
And please, don't kill the messenger. I am trying to explain what's going on. Have you seen the hash distribution rate lately? Here is your clue. You are free to accept or ignore it. Sorry.
Well I didn't want to say that people "should do" something, it could happen because I'm not english native.
By the way if you re-read my post, you'll understand that I'm not pushing my opinion, I'm telling facts.
Does hashrate centralization increase risks to the network? Yes, it does.
Do increased risk to the network increase risks to your BTC holdings value? Yes, it does.
Do you care about your BTC holdings value? Well, it's up to you, but the rational approach would be to care.
So, what's the rational approach for a holder? To support centralization, or to resist it?
Logically if you don't have bitcoins and only want to make fiat profit, you don't care, but it changes completely when you are a holder and want BTC to perform well.
Now about could mining. I didn't think I'd need to explain the differences between having actual hardware and virtual hashrate.
When you have hardware, you just HAVE IT. You can point it to any pool or p2pool, you can basically VOTE with your hashpower. And you won't lose it you the pool is going bankrupt. You are allowed to operate it in a trustless way, like mining on p2pool.
When you have virtual hashrate (it's more like mining shares), you can do neither of the above. (Note that I don't mean hosted mining, it's a different story.) But some risks appear. You can't be sure that your hashrate actually exists, you can't be sure that the market isn't manipulated, you even can't be sure that your hashrate will be worth something in case of service bankruptsy. And you can't be sure that your hashrate isn't being used to perform double-spends (CEX confirmed that their hashrate was used to do this).
Yes, it may look like a good investment (though at this price I doubt so), but at the expense of network security.
