Working for free, as if you were a GPU

Financial intermediary logic, courtesy of Nicehash:

1. What you get is a % of % of what you give.
2. But you don’t really get it, because now it is only % of the minimum %.
3. Profit.

So I recently mined a few days with Nicehash, mainly to test some water cooling setups.

Using just two Radeon 28mm cards (one R9 270x and one R9 380), you can imagine that those bitcoins didn’t exactly flow in by the gazillions 🙂

As the Windows Nicehash app proudly stated that my fortunes are now in excess of 0.001 BTC ($8.00 – $9.00 of old plain money at the time of writing), I decided to give those wary baked Radeons a brake. The whole setup occupied a considerable portion of my desk and a nearby sofa, so I was relieved to capitalize on accrued earnings and disassemble the whole thing.

Problem?

Two days later, I logged in to Nicehash to withdraw those 0.001-something BTC to Coinbase and guess what: after an automatic transaction from my Nicehash account to – guess where – again my Nicehash account, the 0.001-something were now transformed to 0.00098850 BTC (virtual-Nicecash-BTCs, to be precise).

Now I officially have 0.00098850 BTC in my *Nicehash* wallet. Problem is – I cannot do anything with such amount in that “wallet”, because to extract it from there it needs to be at least 0.001 BTC (for a transfer to Coinbase).

Another way to put this:

1. Nicehash gives you whatever they like for the processing power you sell.
2. When you reach 0.001 BTC, Nicehash charges you 2% service fee for “selling hash power” and puts it in your “Nicecash wallet”.
3. Now you have slightly less than 0.001 BTC, and all you can do is: a) mine a second 0.001 BTC to actually get your first 0.001 BTC, or b) feel the warm satisfaction staring at your virtual virtual 0.00098— BTC.