You raise a valid question.

A few months ago Via coin went through a fork and there's was a lot of confusion as to which fork was the right fork - in every market chaos and doubt often create opportunities for those willing to take the risk.

you asked: Why mine a coin you can't trade!!

I thought the same thing a few months ago when Via forked and everyone yanked their miners off to mine 'safe' coins but myself and a few other knew the risk of continuing to mine on a fork that we thought was the right one and we had 90% of the network hash for about 2 days. In those two days with 25 MH/s of mining power I made about 4.7 btc at about $580/btc

The same logic applies to 888 - when there's confusion and doubt the opportunity to take a risk arises. in 6 hours the other day I accumulated nearly 30,000 Octocoin - I took a risk but I have to tell you...for me and a few others it was easy pickins since everyone ran scared and network hash dropped like a rock.

As I write this response 888 Network Hash is still incredibly low network hash and there's one guy in the pool with 15Mh/s that will get over 6,000 888 in a day. Last week that same hash would have only gotten him about 1,500 888

The bottom line is this: at moments like this opportunities exist. There's a well known saying in business: Risk = Reward = Return

At the craps table you can't win unless you roll the dice so right now there's  people betting this will be sorted out and 888 will begin trading again either on Trex or somewhere else and those people will make a very handsome profit off the coins they mined so easily.

Just my humble opinion...