While crypto’s in a bubble, you can actually make a few dollars a day mining altcoins — if you already have fast graphics hardware and your electricity is cheap. But it’s difficult and annoying to pick which altcoin is most profitable today. Enter NiceHash, a service that will mine whatever is giving the best return, and takes a commission.

Unfortunately, they got hacked a few weeks ago. $60 million in users’ Bitcoin payouts was stolen when someone grabbed an engineer’s credentials, got in through NiceHash’s VPN to access the production system and drained the customer wallets.

But you’ll be delighted to hear that NiceHash is back, and up and running! They promise (archive) that they’ll totally pay back everyone from the hack, from “a group of international investors in our business”!

And users are returning, because there’s no serial sucker like a crypto serial sucker. I’m sure it’ll be fine, and running software set up by a hacker convicted and jailed for running botnets will work out well, since he converted his botnet code to a “completely legal pseudo-botnet bitcoin miner.” In any case, he swears his innocence of … running the code he repurposed as NiceHash. “It’s a big misunderstanding. I’m just a programmer.” You should feel no qualms about installing and running this on your main PC as Administrator.

The bad news: you won’t get a payout until you’ve accumulated 0.1 BTC, which at 20:22 UTC 24 December 2017 is $1318 on CoinDesk — which will be a year or so of mining for the typical home user — as lesser payments are “currently on hold” (archive). They’re looking into payouts in an altcoin that isn’t clogged yet and which doesn’t have ridiculous Bitcoin-level transaction fees.

NiceHash say they’ll pay back everyone who lost money in the hack some time or another, and that they’ll announce just when by 31 January 2018 — note that this is the announcement date, not the reimbursement date. I’m sure everyone will eventually get paid and there won’t be another “hack” or exit scam or even a lingering long-unfulfilled promise, or anything like that.

Unfortunately, “balances lower than 0.0001 BTC will be written off; apologies for any inconvenience.”

In the meantime, you still shouldn’t buy a second-hand video card in the next couple of years — and there are reports of miners flashing their video cards with BIOS dumps from anorak.tech, without flashing them back to factory settings before selling them on. “TOTALLY NOT USED FOR MINING — ONLY SLIGHTLY CHARRED — IGNORE BURNING SMELL.”

Get your NiceHash Mining Accident Futures here!