Many people are aware now that the NiceHash crypto mining and hash power trading service, was recently hacked. Over 4000 bitcoin stolen from company and its customers! I haven't been keeping up on the details, but there are lots of threads on reddit and twitter covering news as it develops. It's unknown whether they will be able to recover any of their funds and be able to start rebuilding their customer base. Or if customers that lost large amounts of money would even consider coming back, even if they do get their money reimbursed. I lost about $150 even though I mined to an external wallet, but with the price of bitcoin rising so fast, I missed the last payout threshold by a couple of days. I'm not upset about the loss, especially with the value of btc and steem so high right now. But what I am upset about is the loss of the service, which was very easy to use and the most efficient way by far, to make some extra money with my couple of GPU's. I've tried Minergate, a similar system, but the results are about 1/4 to 1/2 what I was getting with NiceHash.
Now that NiceHash is gone, probably indefinitely, I have to learn about mining the hard way and what the most profitable methods are. I've also been looking at investing in a bigger mining setup, but this recent event made me question if that's the best thing to do right now. I currently heat my house with electricity, so I have a small advantage 8 months of the year. I'm still very new to the crypto world and mining is exciting to me but I'm on the fence about jumping in head first, especially after this NiceHack.
Any advice from the steem crypto mining community? I've been doing tons of research but there is so much to learn, plus it never hurts to get as many opinions as you can. There are lots of other pools and mining software available but it's hard to know what's legit and what will make the most money with the least amount of technical knowledge. Maybe there will be a new service similar to NiceHash to replace it? All things considered, I probably should have just bought bitcoin instead of GPU's 8 months ago, as it would be worth about 3x the current value of what I've mined so far, but there was no way to predict this so at the time, mining seemed a safer bet than just buying crypto. Live and learn I suppose!