My cex.io analysis is less technical. Nonetheless I've been exploring it for a month now, and it's beating the pants off of straightforward mining with my own devices. since their mining has no downtime and Ghs are available by any amount, so it's more efficient than my own miners, even when they're pointed to cexio.
Cex can't compete with hardware miners on preporder for price per Ghs, but compared to however long it takes to accumulate mining rewards, buy miners with them, then await their arrival, the way you can turn a single mining reward into more GHS in seconds at cex is pretty valuable.
The way they mergemine is useful too, since the mined NMC (and/or BTC) can be traded for more Ghs after every confirmed block reward, so by doing this one's own mining speed increases to compete with rising diff. I like to sell all my mined NMC and 10% of my mined BTC for a steady, visible rise on the GHS speed chart. the IXC and DVC don't add up to much BTC, but it's better by far than only mining BTC with private mining contracts.
Cex does make some mysterious market moves, but it differs to regular markets in that cex themselves are presumably constantly adding new Ghs to their supply, and the market is in a constant GHS/BTC downslope as diff rises and GHS make less BTC. This seems disheartening at first, but a bot running an (adjusted) EMA strategy can make gains on fluctuations, and all the time you hold GHS you're mining too.
I screengrabbed and annotated this graph of my december @ cex for an as-yet-unwritten blog post, but it's pretty pertinent here. (it's largely aimed at miners who have a stack of spare NMC but relevant nonetheless)
EDIT: the account from which I post this graph also had a variable 3-6Ghs of hardware miners running on it!
I've done exactly the same with just a tad more GHs (13) and I can tell you this :
Until the recent price crash, there was NO WAY you could even cover the increase of Pool speed, even with reinvesting every single BTC/NMC/IXC/DVC you mined there.
And there is absolutely no way you were able to buy those GHs with the displayed mining power.
Last weeks, ~13GHs 24/7 and everything fully reinvested hourly resulted in an approx. increase of +100MHs/day, slowly creeping up to +110MHs/day - that's 9-10 days just to buy additional 1GHs.
Noteworthy, the most surplus was generated with BTC reinvestment, the direct NMC output/reinvestment was miniscule compared to it and hardly worth mentioning. It really didn't make much difference. If anyone hoped that detail would push you into a positive yield curve - it doesn't happen (wouldn't work even if you could buy GHs with merged mined DVC/IXC, as those have almost no buying power at all).
And we're not even talking about diff increases yet. Without successful trading, it is impossible just to maintain constant payouts over time. You'd have to increase your performance by at least 2-3% every day just to keep up with Pool growth rates to keep your own GHs/Pool GHs ratio constant. That is impossible at cex.io with any GHs, especially as any rented Ghs takes the >3% maintenance fee hit.
(I even had the advantage of using only rented ~1.07GHs that climbed to ~1.98GHs, while running my own ~11.4GHs from Home, so the majority of my GHs weren't even affected by the ~3.3% maintenance fee in the timeframe)
Even with the latest price drop, ~13Ghs would take you some 6-7 days just to get another GHs on top.
Without tossing additional cash (BTC/NMC) at cex.io, your Graph was absolutely impossible to reach - been there, done exactly that with clearly more GHs - most of it not even rented. No-Go, not a chance.
If it was so easy to achieve a positive income curve at cex.io, everyone would do it. I tried for the heck of it but the Problem is : cex is a money-burning machine, your income curve without additional, successful GHs trading will always be negative by design. No matter how many BTC or NMC you throw at them, you'll lose money every day.
If you don't mind losing money and enjoy the convinience of cex trading, they actually work as advertised and their exchange does work pretty good at 0 fees.
PS.
I'll book your post under "shameless plug advertising", as your presented results don't add up, it's simply fairy tales you're telling.
Srsly you're thinking someone humiliated by that ridiculously transparent miningunited scam last year would try bullshitting this forum?
But valid:
there is absolutely no way you were able to buy those GHs with the displayed mining power.
I didn't say that was all my mining power, i just said that was my graph! That graph is but one of several intended for a post-to-be on my blog in the context of supplementing hardware miners with cexio Ghs. What you're not seeing on the graph is my hardware workers. I mentioned them at the start of the post, but didn't specify that fact next to the graph.
No falsehood intended. Editing/disclaimering now. I think I got a referral or two in the last week of the graph too.
Beyond that, there's no fairytaleness about my post: I have a simple homemade bot trading my NMC and a sometimes a bit of my BTC for GHS, and it creates a tiny rise in my GHS speed. Sometimes I see a big candle so I jump in ahead of the bot and sell the NMC manually. Sometimes I sell my altcoins, so I throw in extra BTC to buy GHS with, but only around 0.01BTC at a time, and I do it manually on an appropriate candle. It's kept my BTC block rewards healthy enough for my liking. I still have all my IXC and DVC.
But we're both right on this:
merely holding Ghs in Cex is, so far, seldom all that profitable; it requires more intervention. That said, trading the mined NMC for GHS is a simple and immediate option to help stave off diff increases, and it's the fastest pool I know that mergemines 4 coins, so it's not a terrible choice to point hardware miners at. From a viewpoint of trading for profit, cex as an exchange with 0% fees and GHS as a commodity that earns BTC while you hold it are both favourable.
All these factors combined present opportunities to profit. If that weren't true, there wouldn't be trades happening in there.
That's why I'm upgrading the hell out of my hardware mine and starting to use an custom EMA trading bot on that account from today, so that snapshot of my december was my last opportunity to document it straightforwardly before that account got crazy.
Well yeah I guess cex is like any tool:
you can use it effectively or you can stab yourself in the face with it, but you won't get rich just looking at it.
