Archive for the ‘Cloud Mining’ Category

CEX.IO Has Added New Exchange Trading Pair – IXC/BTC

29, May 2014

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The cloud mining services CEX.IO has added a new trading pair in their exchange, so now you can sell your IXC for BTC directly without having to move them to another exchange. The iXcoin is merge mined with Bitcoin, so you actually get it as a bonus that adds something extra to your Bitcoin profit when mining BTC either with cloud hashrate that you have purchased or by mining at the Ghash.io mining pool with your own mining hardware. The exchange already had Namecoin (NMC) trading and so now the only thing left from the merge mined coins with Bitcoin that needs to be added is the DEVcoin trading. The service has already hinted us that they plan to add USD support to their exchange option that would also allow customers of the service to buy cloud mining hashrate with cash and not only with coins. And with more and more Scrypt ASIC miners starting to hit the market it might not be too long before they also start adding Litecoin cloud mining as an option along the already offered Bitcoin cloud mining option. There are still no dates announced when these features will be made available however.

CoinTerra Has Announced a Bitcoin Cloud Mining Service

13, May 2014

cointerramining-logo

CoinTerra, a company making Bitcoin ASIC miners, has announced their new service for cloud mining as an alternative to the mining hardware they are making and selling to customers. With available plans ranging from 200 GHS to over 1 PHS, CoinTerra certainly is making some bold claims, especially adding the fact that they promise immediate deployment of the purchased hardware. The interesting thing here is that this is the first hardware manufacturer of ASIC devices to launch their own data center and offer cloud mining services with their own hardware. Other ASIC makers such as Zeus and KnC have also announced their plans, however they have not yet launched similar services offering users the ability to purchase hashrate directly from them.

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In theory purchasing cloud mining hashrate directly from the hardware manufacturer should provide users with the best possible prices, however that may not always be true. A real world example shows that with the lowest available contact for 200 GHS of hashrate currently being sold for $999 USD you will be paying about 0.0115 BTC per GHS for 1 year contract this is not the cheapest price you can get comparing to other available services. Of course going for higher hashrate such as 2 THS will make the price per GHS more attractive at 0.0092 BTC which is still higher as compared to CexIO where you can currently get 1 GHS at about 0.0069 BTC. To achieve a similar price you would need to go for at least 1 Petahash at CoinTerra, though if you go for 2 year contracts the price you get for the second year is better and if you compare the prices to Cloud Hashing they do look much better.

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Currently the company sells their TerraMiner IV 1.6 THS Bitcoin Miner for $3499 USD or less than two times cheaper compared to the 2 THS cloud mining plan they have available for 1 year priced at $7999 USD. And there is another thing that is not very clearly defined is if there will be a maintenance fee for the cloud mining hashrate you are going to be purchasing. There is a brief mention of 5% combined fee (including maintenance) in the formula that is being used to calculate your Bitcoin earnings in the CoinTerra Mining Sales Agreement. The maintenance fee is not uncommon for cloud mining services, but with the fee subtracted from our mined earnings and these prices we can easily say that there are already better priced and proven alternatives than CoinTerraMining that not only are offering better price per GHS, but are already well established and trusted and make it much easier for the users to monitor, control and even withdraw earnings as soon as a block is mined and confirmed. In short, good job for CoinTerra to come out with such a service first among ASIC manufacturers, but the initial terms, prices and functionality they are offering does not make the service so much attractive as you would expect.

– For more information about the new CoinTerraMining Bitcoin cloud mining service…

Our New Cloud Mining Service Testing Progress Report

13, May 2014

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We haven’t updated our cloud mining progress report for a while now, so we have decided to write down our latest impressions form the services we are currently testing or have tested already. And with services such as MarketsCX and Bit-Mining disappearing, creating a lot of trust issues with other and especially with newer cloud mining services it is good to give an overview based on our own experience. The biggest concern with most cloud mining services is if they are here to stay and will not take away your coins or money and run away with them. Especially true with new services that have just launched and the way they run and the information they provide raises some concerns. That is why we do recommend to always do some research and start small should you decide to test a new cloud mining service and be very careful, unless you are sure to be investing in an already proven and established service.

CexIO is probably the oldest and biggest Bitcoin cloud mining service, no concerns there, though our experience has shown that it is good mostly for trading GHS/BTC and long term investment in Bitcoin cloud mining hashrate does not work that well. The service does plan to launch Litecoin cloud mining as well, but it is still not available, though they have been expanding the list of services they have such as adding Scrypt mining pools as well as introducing a trading fee on their exchange and adding future cloud mining contracts for trading. Currently the price of 1 GHS worth of Bitcoin cloud mining hashrate is around 0.0069 BTC and near the end of this month it should most likely go below 0.006 BTC judging from the current FHM trading price.

PBMining is a Bitcoin cloud mining service intended for long term investment as there is no exchange where you can buy/sell the purchased hashrate at any time and you buy a 5 years long mining contract. The service has probably the best prices per GHS for BTC cloud mining hashrate and this along with the 5 year contract makes a lot of people concerned and we were a bit concerned as well initially. However the fact that we’ve been using PiggyBack Mining for almost 3 months already and we didn’t have any problem and were always getting our weekly payouts on time we are not that concerned about them anymore… especially comparing to the bad experience we’ve had with other services that are no longer available. Currently the price per 1 GHS is 0.005 BTC per GHS and the price gets down usually every difficult increase of the Bitcoin network.

Cloud Hashing is a Bitcoin cloud mining service that has been available for some time and seems to be a very serious one according to what they claim (3.79 PHS total hasrate). The service has own dedicated pool and you get control over the workers you have via a web-based dashboard depending on the mining contracts you have purchased. The only drawback of this service is the not so attractive price they have for the hashrate that you can purchase in the form of a 1 year contract. You are not able to purchase minimum of 30 GHS and they are a bit expensive at $299 or 0.69 BTC (0.023 BTC per GHS), so not easy to test the service with a very low investment before deciding if it is worth to invest more. After all everything that a miner wants to get is profit when investing in either Bitcoin mining hardware or in cloud mining services and the numbers here don’t look so good. The fact that the price for the cloud mining packages offered does not adjust with the change in difficulty does not help either.

ScryptCC is the first Litecoin cloud mining service that we’ve tried a while ago and we were very excited about it at first, but were not very satisfied by the level of support we were getting – very slow response to issues. Though things seem to have been improving the fact is that this is the only more serious Scrypt cloud mining service that remains after others such as MarketsCX and Bit-Mining have disappeared. The service is apparently using GPUs making it harder to add additional hashrate and thus the prices are mostly depending on the trading going on between users. Currently the lowest price of 1 KHS worth of Litecoin cloud mining hashrate is available for 0.000719 LTC and when we started testing it about three months ago it was pretty much double that price.

We’ve seen quite a few other new cloud mining services popping up, but no other serious enough made in terms of user functionality that is currently available. Other similar services rise some concerns, don’t have detailed mining reporting and/or trading functionality etc. Again we do recommend to always do some research and start small should you decide to test a new cloud mining service and be very careful, so that even if it disappears quickly you will not loose much!


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