May 2018 update – Please note both the mining pool and trading platform for CEX.io were discontinued several years ago. Now it operates as a UK based cryptocurrency exchange.
Originally published November 2014. December 2014 – Our full review of gHash.io, the pool behind is CEX is here
I set up a new account with CEX.io and then lodged some bitcoin on it, and purchased ten gigahashes of bitcoin mining goodness.
Personally, I mine with a small amount on with CEX.io, with some privately hosted crunching power pointing at my main account with BTCGuild. Nothing major, just about 15ghs overall between the two. I’ve used the last six months after burning out my laptop monitor and nearly cooking my GPU mining litecoins (that’s a story for another blog post) to learn how the maths and economics behind bitcoin mining work, and argued with my wife about whether bitcoin is skynet or not, and see the law of diminishing returns kick in in time with the difficulty increasing fortnightly.
So with my private mining, I paid a fixed amount back in March for an agreed timeframe mining away. Luckily, my supplier lets me pick and choose where I want to point my mining at, so I also have stats for a later post about mining on CEX.io with your own hardware. While the amount of shares I’ve submitted there have remained relatively static for the whole six months it’s been running so far on BTC Guild, the interval before hitting the automatic cashpoint have gotten longer. But over the summer I blew most of what I had accumulated on some great steam games using Steamloader, and the rest I stuck onto CEX.io to give it a go. I’ll leave a review of the screens and stuff for a later post, but your miner will hash on the ghash.io pool, and use a shared account between the two sites.
So the process for me, was I had bought some bitcoins and got them sent to my Bitcoin Armory wallet (great and free for those looking for a secure desktop wallet). I went to the Balance page, got my address to send it to, put it into bitcoin armory and sent it. Bitcoin armory flashed up a message saying sent, and the lodgement showed up on the screen in a few seconds. I then realised I’d put too little in, and had put in an extra decimal point so did a second lodgement quickly. After about forty minutes, it had confirmed and been usable in my account. Back to the ghs/btc page, selected how much I had and bought just over 10ghs. This has been running for the last 30 hours, and shows quite well how the maintenance fees work. Block rewards are quite regular with them, given they have about a quarter of the market share, and after six confirmations on ghash the balance gets credited.
Unlike BTCGuild though, where you can just watch your number tick up until it hits the payout point, with CEX.io you have a full service of an exchange. Verify your details with them and you can lodge dollars, but the company is based in London so there’s a good chance Euro will be coming soon. So as you get rewards, you can choose either to let them build up, or reinvest them for fractions of bitcoins. This lets you add a couple of ghs if you want over time.
On my personal account, I saw a big swing in my rewards, like I had with BTCGuild around the overall pool strength. At one point it was 54phs, then it dropped down to 44phs or so, and i saw my block reward payout rise a lot, while the maintenance fee stayed the same. So this meant that when pool speed was high, and had blocks of hours between blocks, the maintenance fee took most of the reward, or in some cases more, but this was offset when there were two or three blocks in the same period.
So my first few days are below, and just keep in mind that ghash.io splits things into ~11 minute shifts, so the first hour and a half figures would include the ramp up in rewards and are stable further down. Where you see a buy order and the total drops, that’s where I’ve reinvested to get a fraction more of processing power. You don’t have to! 🙂
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