Archive for the ‘Crypto News’ Category

More Details About the KnCMiner Titan ASIC Chips Revealed

15, May 2014

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KnCMiner has revealed some more additional details about the chips that are going to be used in their upcoming Scrypt ASIC miners, the now already expected to provide a hashrate of 300 MHS Titan. It seems that each KnC Titan will will have four Scrypt ASIC chips in order to make sure they’ll output the guaranteed minimum performance of 300 MHS. Each chip will have 2284 cores that will be able to run 18272 threads simultaneously and will have 300MB of onboard memory. And since we are going to have 4 chips in each miner, this means that each Titan will come with 9136 cores running 73088 threads in total and resulting 300 MHS of Scrypt hashrate.

KnC says they were able to squeeze all of that in a 55 mm x 55 mm package while simultaneously extracting over 300 Watts worth of thermal energy, so it will be interesting to see how will they be able to cool these units. This however means that the total power consumption for a 4 chip Titan could go up to 1200W. According to KnCMiner the final tape out of the chips should happen within the next few weeks, or with other words the miners are not going to be ready to ship in Q2 and early Q3 is probably way too optimistic… so maybe something like August or September seems like a reasonable expectations. The price of the 300 MHS KnCMiner Titan Scrypt ASIC miner is still $9995 USD without VAT.

With all that said we are already seeing Scrypt-based ASIC miners using the Innosilicon’s A2 28nm chips to be already on sale and apparently shipping. And while these are more expensive and go only up to about 80-90 MHS, they can be further scaled up with more modules, the problem that remains however is that they come pretty expensive, though you can get them without having to wait them on pre-order. So it will be very interesting to see how will things progress on the Scrypt ASIC market in the next few months. Zeus is also expected to start shipping their first batch of 55 nm Scrypt ASIC miners in just 5 more days, so these should be able to fill in the gap between the smaller Gridseed’s GC3355-based miners and the Innosilicon A2-based big miners.

USCC Research Report: Bitcoin’s Uncertain Future in China

13, May 2014

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The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, an organization created to monitor, investigate, and submit to the United States Congress an annual report on the national security implications of the bilateral trade and economic relationship between the United States and the People’s Republic of China has published an interesting report. The research report is called Bitcoin’s Uncertain Future in China and covers what has happened in the world of Bitcoin in the last few months with China entering strongly the market and now slowly withdrawing from it and covers what can happen in the future with Bitcoin in China and how can that affect Bitcoin globally. If you haven’t been following what was going on in China regarding Bitcoin and how the Chinese government is apparently trying to affect Bitcoin trading in the country you can get up to speed by checking out the document that is freely available.

– To read the full USCC research paper Bitcoin’s Uncertain Future in China in PDF format…

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…


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