Archive for the ‘Cloud Mining’ Category

Checking Out the Lunamine Bitcoin Cloud Mining Service

9, Jul 2014

lunamine-cloud-mining-service

It seems that the currently most affordable in terms of price Bitcoin cloud mining services – PBMining and Bitcoin Cloud Services might have some new competition. By new we really mean new, as a new BTC cloud mining service was apparently very recently launched in Sweden called Lunamine. We normally do not review services that were just launched and usually give them some time to see if they are not just some sort of a new scam and to give them some time to fix bugs and improve the features they offer before reviewing them, however we were asked by readers to check this new service out and we have decided to do so.

lunamine-bitcoin-mining-contracts

What makes this new service interesting, and by new we really mean new as their domain name was registered on 30th June this year or a little over a week ago, is the fact that they claim to offer pretty much the best price per GHS for Bitcoin cloud mining. They even manage to beat some other services that were fighting to offer the best price to customers by a bit, like the two we already mentioned. The current rate stated on their website is 0.0025 BTC per GHs, but the real rate can be slightly higher due to the variance in BTC exchange rate. They accept payments in BTC only, though the contract prices are listed in USD prices and they apparently calculate how much BTC you need to pay with the current exchange rate for the contract you have chosen based on the USD price. Initially Lunamine has launched a free 7 day trial with 10 GHS for people to try their service, but apparently this was very quickly stopped due to people abusing it (according to the official information published). So at the moment you can purchase a contract of minimum 100 GHS for $160 USD or about 0.254 BTC, or go for a 1 THS contract for $1400 USD or about 2.2229 BTC (you can get multiple of these as well). We have chosen the 100 GHS contract for our testing and yesterday when we have purchased it e had to pay 0.25234804 BTC for it or about 0.00252 BTC per GHs.

You will probably notice that there is no term period cited for the contracts duration, something that is a bit confusing as it says “Lifetime validity” and “No operational fees” when you are about to purchase a contract. There is a catch though, as Lifetime validity actually means until the hashrate purchased by you actually brings some profit for you when you pay for the electricity cost. Yes, there may be “No operational fees”, however you need to pay fee for electricity used and the rate is $0.0032 per GHS per day, and so for a 100 GHS contract you have to pay $0.32 USD a day for electricity and the rest of the mined coins you get as profit. Doing a quick calculation shows that at the moment you can mine around 0.00299 BTC per day with 100 GHS hashrate or your daily profit will be around $1.85 USD minus the $0.32 USD fee for electricity or around $1.50 USD with the current network difficulty of Bitcoin. This would take around 106 days or about three months and a half for you to break even on your investment and actually start earning on to of what you have invested if the conditions remain the same as in the current moment… and they will not be as the network difficulty will continue to rise. So do have in mind that as in about three months and a half from now if the network difficulty continues to rise with 10% you will be making about half of what you can currently mine with the same hashrate and the fee for the used power will remain the same. If you remain with only 100 GHS the lifetime of this contract will be roughly about 230-240 days or about 8 months before the mined coins will not be able to cover the electricity fee, that is if the price of Bitcon remains the same and the network difficulty continues to increase by about 10% each time, so not that accurate calculation.

lunamine-logged-in-dashboard

After we have purchased our contract it took about an hour for the payment to be processed and in about two hours the contract was activated, though this may take up to 12 hours according to the service description. Another thing to note is that while your mined coins get credited in your account, there is no automatic daily or weekly payout, you need to request the payout manually and in order to do so you need to already have accumulated at least 0.01 BTC. Furthermore since the payouts are apparently processed manually it can take up to 48 hours for your request to be fulfilled again according to the official information published about the service. We haven’t tried withdrawing yet as we’ve just started testing the service and have not yet generated enough BTC in order to be able to request a withdraw of the mined coins.

An important word of advice though, we have just started testing this service and since the service is really very new we do recommend serious caution! If you are interested in trying it out always start with a minimum investment and with something that you can afford to loose if things go bad. We are going to continue using the service and will be reporting how things progress with it as well as our own experience using the service.

– For more information about Lunamine’s Bitcoin Cloud Mining Services currently offered…

Bitcoin Cloud Mining Services Current Price Comparison

2, Jul 2014

bitcoin-current-network-difficulty

We have decided to do a quick roundup of the current Bitcoin cloud mining prices you can find with various service providers that we have tested or covered so far. We are not covering Scrypt cloud mining services this time as currently the Litecoin difficulty is high and price, along with the price of most other Scrypt crypto currencies is currently quite low, so it might not be the best moment to invest in Scrypt at the moment. While at the same time the Bitcoin price is quite nice at the current level, though the network difficulty has been steadily increasing as well. We have decided to have two categories, one for the typical cloud mining services an the other for the hashrate renting services as an alternative for short term investment in more hashrate. Do note however that renting hashrate or mining rigs to mine Bitcoins for you with Bitcoins might not be the wisest idea.

Typical BTC cloud mining services:
– Bitcoin Cloud Services – 0.00290000 BTC per GHS, 5 years, no pool fee, no maintenance fee
– PBMining – 0.00300143 BTC per GHS, 5 years, no pool fee, no maintenance fee
– CEX.io – 0.00682705 BTC per GHS, indefinite, no pool fee, has maintenance fee
– Cointerra Mining – 0.00775 BTC per GHS, 1 year contract, pool and maintenance fees
– Hashop.io – 0.00844000 BTC per GHS, 2 years, no pool fee, maintenance electricity fee
– Cloud Hashing – 0.0116375 BTC per GHS, 1 year contract, pool and maintenance fees

Hashrate renting mining services:
– Nice Hash – 0.00002620 BTC per GHS per Day (current)
– Mining Rig Rentals – 0.00003490 BTC per GHS per Day (current), cheapest 0.00003 BTC

Checking Out Bitcoin Cloud Services

29, Jun 2014

bitcoincloudservices

It seems that the PBMining Bitcoin cloud mining service may finally have an interesting alternative for people that are interested in purchasing Bitcoin cloud mining hashrate. Not that so far we’ve had any problems with that service for the last 4 months we’ve been using it, however we still do have some concerns as some people also do. The biggest concern is that the Canadian guys operating that service do remain quite anonymous and do not reveal much information about their mining operations. In the world of crypto currencies anonymity is important for the miners, but when somebody wants to take your money (or hard earned coins) you would want to know a bit more about that person or company in order to have enough trust in them. So for the people concerned there is now an alternative called Bitcoin Cloud Services operated by a company based in London, UK. This service apparently does try to copy the same model for offering Bitcoin cloud mining services, but they do try to be more open to their customers and not remain anonymous. We need to mention that this new company that apparently started their cloud mining operations in March this year has not been very actively promoting their services until recently. The most interesting thing however is that they are currently offering pretty much the most attractive price per GHS of Bitcoin cloud mining hashrate.

bitcoincloudservices-price

Currently Bitcoin Cloud Services offers 5 year contracts fro Bitcoin cloud mining with the hashrate going at 0.0034 BTC per GHS. There are no additional fees for maintenance, electricity or pool fees that you need to pay and they do have daily payouts of the coins earned with your purchased hashrate. As we have already mentioned this does seem very similar to the terms offered by PBMining, though the price per GHS here is a bit cheaper and you get daily payouts instead of weekly ones, so some other advantages besides the fact that the service is not anonymously operated. When we see long term contracts such as 5 year ones available at a very good price we do get a warning light on, so we do recommend to be cautious.

bitcoincloudservices-minimum-order

We have decided to give the service a try and have purchased 10 GHS, the minimum you could purchase, though a day after we have payed for our mining contract the minimum hashrate that you can purchase has been increased to 20 GHS. We have paid 0.034 BTC for the 10 GHS, though now the minimum you need to spend to try the service is double that amount or 0.068 BTC. Based on the order number we got, we should be around the 500th customer of the service, though if not all orders have been completed the number of actual customers could be less and the actual orders could have started with a higher number than 1. Our order was placed on June 26th and paid in Bitcoins – you have to pay only with Bitcoin and you can choose between BitPay and CoinBase. About an hour after we have made the payment our order has been marked as completed and the mining has started based on our purchased hashrate. We got an estimate on what our first daily payment will be and the date for the first payout was shown as 28th, as apparently we have made the order near the end of the day on the 26th.

bitcoincloudservices-active-contract

Yesterday we have received our first daily payout and it was exactly 0.00041279 BTC. Doing a quick calculation has shown that if the Bitcoin network difficulty remains the same and the daily payout is also the same as the one we got the first day we are going to need a little over 82 days to get back what we have spent for the mining contract. We know however that the actual time needed will be more as the network hashrate is steadily increasing over time, but still the time for return of investment should be estimated to something like half an year. So things may not look so bad if you are interested in long term Bitcoin cloud mining contracts, and you might want to check out the Bitcoin Cloud Services.

What we need to note from our still short experience with the service so far is the fact that you are setting the BTC payment address prior to making an order and you cannot directly edit it from your profile, you need to contact the support to change it. This is apparently a means to make things more secure, but can also be inconvenient should you need to change the address for some reason. Also the service needs a bit of work on the features available in the user account, namely some information about past payments as well as total payments as currently you only get information about the last payment you got. Furthermore some work is needed on the overall reporting of purchased hashrate and earnings, as currently you get some very basic information and you need to enter every contract information page for this. So this is the key thing that needs some more work, the user account backend could be improved to be more user friendly and informative.

An important word of advice though, we have just started testing this service and although it seems quite transparent and legit at first look, as usual we do recommend caution! If you are interested in trying it out always start with a minimum investment and with something that you can afford to loose if things go bad. As we have already mentioned the company apparently started in March, however it seems that their real could mining operations have started sometime earlier this month. A a little over a week ago they have made an official announcement topic at Bitcointalk (June 19th) and on the next day they have made an announcement of becoming a silver member of the Bitcoin Foundation. This and the fact that they have posted on their Twitter and Facebook accounts since May essentially does bring some confidence, along with the publicly available information about the company behind the service, but there are still some concerns. We are going to continue using the service and will be reporting how things progress with it as well as our own experience using the service.

Update: It seems that the Bitcoin Cloud Services is no longer paying users since June 7th 2015, so do not purchase anything from them as their website is still available and accepts payments!

– For more information about what Bitcoin Cloud Services offers for BTC cloud mining…


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