The whole thing is very simple, rent the hardware, mine, make profit. You recover your 'rental' cost by selling the GH/s you rented. Maybe this is the 'gifted' part you were referring to. I guess I must be gifted as I am able to sell when I see the price falling.
For the future, I do see BTC price increasing. Certainly the difficulty will sky-rocket when the next gen hardware pops out. It will also drop the cex.io cost per GH/s (or any other cloud hashing service).
Yes, it is that simple...
Rent the hardware at less than 50% ROI, you will not recover your 'rental' costs by selling the GHs that by that time have systemically fallen in price. Which it does every week, despite the harsh manipulation occuring daily in the cex.io 'market' to keep prices beyond 200% of their true value.
Certainly the difficulty will sky-rocket when the next gen hardware pops out. It will also drop the cex.io cost per GH/s
And that's exactly what you're missing out in your calculation, your BTC and (if reinvested) your rented GHs
is nominally rising of course,
but falling in value faster than that.It's best compared to investing Dollars @ interest at a bank, and making 2% interest while experiencing a 4% inflation - that's how you lose money despite rising nominal numbers that may make you feel good.
Selling out completely before any significant price drop (natural or manipulated) is paramount, and we both know that is impossible to achieve every single time (which if you fail one single time, your investment goes the road of everything cex.io and mining power - it loses value).
If you were able to do that - you'd not be trading @ cex.io but at Wall Street and be a multi-millionaire by now.
A typical comparison between average own hardware and cex.io, is that your total investment with own hardware may or may not achieve ROI (depending on purchase price, BTC valuation development, diff and resale price).
Cex.io is different, as it guarantees you loss of investment (about 40-50% without trading and depending on time held onto rented GHs).
As a rule of thumb - the longer you rent&hold GHs @ cex.io, the more money you will lose of that rent investment.
If you were to re-invest everything you mine at cex.io indefinitely, you total net value would eventually approach near Zero - despite owning thousands of near-worthless GHs with them. This is how their game works.
Where do you get your (mis)information?
You obviously have just trolled the forums and now assume you know everything.
Renting hardware does not have such a bad ROI. It is rented, not purchased.
For instance I purchased some GH/s 2 weeks ago, it cost 0.042 BTC per share. now worth 0.046 BTC per share...now most people would call this a profit of 0.004 BTC per share... in just 2 weeks, plus I profited from the mining revenue generated by the shares.
So, to put simply: profit + profit = more profit. Not the guaranteed loss that too many fools seem to think.
Yes, the value of GH/s will drop as difficulty goes up. Consider it the cost of renting the equipment, which would not be free, but a lot less in the short term when compared to purchasing the same equipment.
However, it seems that your view is that renting is not viable, purchasing hardware is also not viable, the only way to make money with BTC is hoard it and gamble on the price rising....then claim all other ways are certain to make a loss.
What I can tell you for certain is I have more BTC now than I did 2 weeks ago, and the BTC price is about the same. So it sure looks like a profit to me.