Archive for the ‘Crypto Coins’ Category

Just about a week ago we have covered our 1 month long test of Storj while the service was still in beta and now they have announced that the Beta stage is over already. Storj, a Blockchain-based encrypted cloud storage service, allows users to get cheaper and reliable storage as compared to traditional storage solutions out there and also allows users with free space to rent it and get some extra income for the data being stored on their computers. It is an interesting concept and Storj is not the only service that is exploring the capabilities of the blockchain for that kind of usage as well as the use of a crypto token.

Since not that much has changed in the last week when we last used the service you can check the previous post linked above with some of our freedback and experience. The main concern we have at the moment is regarding the ease of use for users wiling to store their data on the Storj network… it just isn’t as easy as you’d normally expect. That, combined with the fact that Storj is offering 25GB of space and 25GB of traffic monthly for 12 months is making it harder for users that have some free space on their hard drives that want to make it usable and earn something back for renting it to Storj. Of course the service needs to attract users and their initial free offer sure does seem interesting in getting users to give it a try, but then again they also need to work on making it easier to store and access the data on the network.

If you pass the free space and traffic that you get when you sign up you will be charged at $0.015 USD for extra GB / month and $0.05 USD per GB of traffic, though the free 25GB should be enough for many users. After the initial 12 months promotional period you will need to pay for the storage space and bandwidth you will be using and unfortunately even though Storj has their own crypto token, you are not able to use any SCJX coins to pay for storage currently… you can only earn these tokens if you rent your hard drive space. So this is something that also needs more work in order to close the ecosystem and this is apparently something that is already planned in the future.

You can check out the official website of Storj for more details…

Storj is a Blockchain-based encrypted cloud storage service that we’ve been keeping an eye on since the earlier beta days and while it is still in Beta we are checking how things are progressing from time to time. Running the Storj Share application for providing your free hard drive space for rent and earning some SJCX tokens in return is what still most people are probably interested in. That is precisely why we’ve setup a test 100GB shared space on the Storj network to see what we can expect to get after a month and more importantly if we are even going to be able to fill in that space with data.

When you register on Storj as a user willing to store some data on the network you get 25GB for free for the first 12 months, so no need to pay anything up front if you are interested in checking out the service. The problem here is that unlike the Storj Share app when you want to upload and then access some data it is not as easy as you might expect, this needs some more work making a user friendly and easy to use interface for regular users and not giving some tools that might appeal only to developers at this point.

Not being very easy to upload and access data of course affects the number of users of the service that what to use the storage functionality and thus after a whole month with 99%+ uptime our test has shown not so good results. Out of the 100GB of space we have provided to the Storj Share we have managed to get less than 40 filled with over 100000 contracts. With a price set at $0.015 USD for GB / month and $0.05 USD per GB by the Storj service for users willing to store data on their network you would need to be sharing much more space and having it actually used to make the numbers look good if you want to rent out your free space.

You can check out the official website of Storj for more details…

Another PascalCoin (PASC) pool, one brought by Suprnova, seems to be now open for beta testing, though apparently not fully functional. The new pool brings much better support and functionality as compared to the first available pool from Nanopool, so you might want to check it out. The PASC Suprnova pool offers Stratum support and comes with the familiar sgminer with support for mining PascalCoin on both AMD and Nvidia GPUs, though apparently a version of ccMiner will also soon be available for Nvidia miners… there is also a Windows and Linux miner available.

The pool has not yet found its first block and the payment part does not seem to be fully functional yet, but you can still try the miner and point some hashrate to help in testing things out. The pool fee is 1% and you should be able to do manual payout and not have a minimum payout limit, also stats is working much better and reported hashrate is quite accurate on miner/poolside, the stratum support also should ensure better efficiency. We have given a try of the Windows miner and have noticed it does tend to have a pretty high CPU and memory usage, but it does still seem to work well.

You can check out the new PascalCoin (PASC) mining pool at Suprnova here…
Here is a 64-bit Windows binary of the sgminer fork with PascalCoin support for the pool…


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