Here's a my newbie Nicehash questions:
1) When to look for the most profitable coin I look at the "currently paying" column on the homepage, right?
So when it says X11 is the most profitable at 0.2749 and then I see Neoscrypt at 5.3425 or X13 at 0.3391, etc. Why aren't they highlighted as most profitable?
That is because the average hashing rate for each algo is different. Let's say your card can only hash 5.5Mh/s on X11 and 256kh/s on Neoscrypt. Your card is only hashing 4.65% compared to X11. So, even if Neoscrypt is paying 5.3425 you're really only making an equivalent of 0.2487 at your Neoscrypt hashing rate compared to X11 at 0.274.
2) What's the advantage of renting power? I guess I can mine whatever coin I want with the rented power? Is there any profit to be made that way by renting hashing power and mining with it?
If you play it right, you can pump a large amount of hash power on a coin that has a low difficulty. Which means you would have the greater advantage of getting more coins than the average miner. Then, dump it while it's hot.
3) By renting on Nicehash, Is this another way of doing "cloud mining"? But I guess you can see what you rent instead of cloud mining where you just get daily payouts and nothing more.
Thanks!
This isn't "cloud mining" as you define it. This is very much like mining rig rental, except the mining rigs are not all sitting in a centralized datacenter. The hash power is distributed among mining rigs that are connected to Nice/WestHash service all over the world. Because you are not renting a "single" mining rig, your hash rate is not dependent on a single rig's availability. The many rigs connected to Nice/Westhash are automatically distributed to provide the hashing power you need.