Why I'm mining at GHash.io

There is a lot of fear about GHash.io being too big. For some reason many seem to assume that the pool owners are evil and will do a 51% attack when they get the chance. I think most don't even understand what it really means. A known pool will never succeed in such an attack for very long, nor is likely that double spending and blocking other pools for a short while will destroy bitcoin, although it would probably cause some sort term turmoil. Enough on that ...

So why am I mining there? One simple reason, I'm making bitcoin. Many are shouting out that you can't make money there, but they aren't there and haven't tried it. This is one place where the theory doesn't match reality.

1) Most every calculator I've tried is just plain wrong. I can easily see how many blocks I get paid for and what the awards are. It is pretty easy to see I made this made in a day, but what is hard to getting a calculator to even come close to correct. For the record I've been averaging .00001167 BTC per GHS since the last difficulty change.

2) Cex.io has a trading API that lets me do what I want with my BTC & GHS. It is bigger part of why I'm gaining. I have been writing some simple bots that on some days make a lot more than mining. The worst case is my bot fails and I end up just all mining or all BTC. What other pool can I do that with?

3) There is a sort of free market there. It is limited but it is growing. The price of GHS doesn't just fall, it goes up and down. If I wanted I can also trade between BTC and LTC, NMC and a couple of worthless coins. The fact that I'm getting some NMC form the merged mining is just a bonus.

4) It is very easy to mine, just buy some GHS and you are mining.

5) Where I live the cost of power is very high, too high even for ASIC mining, so cloud mining is pretty much my only choice for BTC

Okay it isn't all great ...
  * Performance of the website is poor
  * There are a lot of trolls there
  * The price of GHS is very high at around $40 USD

About the money, I wished I kept better records before I broke even, but here is a current week.

Jan-10 Base .0465 BTC/GHS
Jan-11 2.10% .0486 BTC/GHS <=== Most of the gain was from the price change
Jan-12 0.60% .0490 BTC/GHS
Jan-13 -1.51% .0454 BTC/GHS
Jan-14 .52% .0459 BTC/GHS
Jan-15 .16% .0458 BTC/GHS <=== Only gained from mining
Jan-16 1.01% .0460 BTC/GHS

Of coarse if I took my readings at a different time of day the results would look different because the price of GHS varies. Still I would be up, in raw terms I gained 4.61% more bitcoin over that period.

I don't know if I'll be having the same results a month from now. But I'm pretty sure this currently the only place I could do what I'm doing.