Archive for the ‘Tests and Reviews’ Category

E-Coin Bitcoin Debit Card and Multi-Sig Wallet

28, Nov 2015

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Getting and using a Bitcoin Debit Card to spend Bitcoins at places where BTC is not normally accepted as a form of payment is a convenient way to spend your crypto coins, so services that offer such capabilities such as E-Coin are getting more and more user attention. We actually have and are using a physical Bitcoin debit card from for quite a while already, but there are always more new options available such as getting a virtual Bitcoin debit card or a physical one from the E-Coin Bitcoin debit card and multi-sig wallet service. The biggest advantage of this service is that you can get a virtual VISA debit card that is powered by Bitcoin in just a few minutes after you register for the service. Then you just send in Bitcoins to your wallet and transfer them to the card and you can spend them for online purchases from around the world where VISA is accepted. When sending BTC to your E-Coin online wallet you just need to wait for 3 confirmations before you can actually use the coins you have sent, so it takes less time than the usual 6 confirmations. At a later time you can either upgrade your virtual card to a physical one, or get another physical card should you need so and it will be shipped to you with either regular or express service.

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You can request to get a Bitcoin debit card is either EUR, USD or GBP as a currency. Getting a virtual debit card you normally need to pay $3 USD, and for a physical card $17 USD if you wan the card shipped to you via Royal Mail with standard shipping or $50 USD for express shipping with DHL. The virtual Bitcoin debit card issues to you will be available in a couple of minutes and you can start using it for online payments, while a physical card will take some time to be delivered to you and then you need to activate it before it can be used. There are multiple of ways available for you to pay the fee required to get your Bitcoin debit card such as with Bitcoin from your account, through PayPal, with an existing bank card etc. Once you get your card you would have some limits on the amount you can spend through the card and if you want to increase the limits you will need to go through a verification process to extend the limits. For an EUR Bitcoin debit card you start with a maximum total ATM withdraw limit of 1000 EUR and you can remove this limit once you pass the verification process, there are no limits on POS or Online payments, though the total maximum Bitcoin you can load in the card is the equivalent of 2500 EUR, again removing this limit once you verify. The standard limits are more than enough for you to try out the card and decide for yourself if it is something you want to keep using, so that you will provide identity verification to increase your card’s limits. Do note that one thing specific to the E-Coin Bitcoin debit card is that normally the balance you have in the online wallet is not directly available in the card to be used, you need to “load” the card with the desired amount that you need spending. This way you can get an extra level of security if you loose the card or it gets stolen.

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Here are the Bank/VISA fees associated with the Bitcoin debit card regardless if it is virtual or a physical one, the fees are pretty reasonable and the only thing that you need to be more careful with is the “Foreign Transaction Fee” of 3% that you will be charged if the transaction is not in the card’s currency. This means that if you have an EUR card and you purchase something in Euro there will be no extra fees for you, but if you withdraw 100 USD from that EUR card from an ATM you will have to pay 2.25 EUR fee for the ATM transaction as well as 3% extra fee to convert your EUR balance to USD. This foreign transaction fee is something that is available with other similar products like the Bitcoin debit card from E-Coin, you just need to be aware of it when using the card.

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Here are the default limits you get for the Bitcoin debit cards either virtual or physical that you can get. The limits for the Unverified do not require any personal documents from the user meaning that you cans tart using your Bitcoin debit card immediately after you register and request the card (for virtual) or as soon as you get the physical card and you activate it. In order to increase the limits of the Bitcoin debit card you need to provide identity documents that must be verified according to AML and KYC regulations – scanned ID and proof of address is required. Once you get verified the limits of the card are pretty high and you should not have any more trouble using the card daily even for more significant amounts.

We have already got a virtual VISA Bitcoin debit card in EURO currency from the service and were pretty pleasantly surprised how fast the card was available for us to use, of course limited to doing only online payments. We have since then requested the virtual Bitcoin debit card to be upgraded to a plastic one and are currently waiting for the physical card to arrive. Meanwhile we can use our virtual card just fine and once we get the plastic card we need to activate it, making the virtual card unavailable anymore as the physical card should be with a different number than the virtual one. We are going to share some more feedback from the service once we ge the physical Bitcoin debit card from E-Coin, but so far we are pretty happy with the service. So if you are in need of a way to spend Bitcoins in a more traditional way with a bank card in places where BTC is nor directly accepted, then you might want to give the service a try.

– For more information about the virtual and physical E-Coin VISA Bitcoin Debit Cards…

Gigabyte GTX 970 WF3 With Different Versions of ccMiner SPMOD

20, Nov 2015

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Since we’ve been closely following the development of the different ccMiner forks and have been compiling Windows binaries for most of the updated versions we have decided to do an interesting test. We have picked up the last 20 releases of the ccMiner SPMOD fork for Maxwell and tested them on a Gigabyte GTX 970 WF3 GPU running at stock frequencies to see what has happened with the hashrate in the X11, Quark, NeoScrypt and LyraREv2 algorithms. The first version we tested with ccMiner 1.5.53-git SP is from early July and looking at the results it seems that the most notable improvement is with Quark as well as some slight improvement with X11. Lyra2REv2 support has been added in release ccMiner 1.5.60-git SP, so there are no results prior to that, it seems however that the initial versions and the last one have pretty much the same hashrate with some drop with some in-between versions. The NeoScrypt hashrate hasn’t changed much, there is some slight variance with different versions probably due to the Boost frequency of the GPU variating a bit. Do note that these are results with publicly available and open source code, there could be some higher performance private miners also available…

Sending Bitcoins to a PayPal Account with Coinimal

8, Nov 2015

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We have recently tested the service Bitwala for sending BTC to PayPal, but the use of eChecks makes the transfer of the coins to money in PayPal very slow, so we started looking for alternative. One such alternative that we found, also operated by an European company that apparently is targeting only European users (supports only EUR as a fiat currency), is called Coinimal and we have decided to give it a go as well. This service supports not only Bitcoin to PayPal, but sending Bitcoin to bank accounts via SEPA as well as multiple other payment systems, though our focus was on the PayPal support. Another interesting thing about Coinimal is that it is not only for selling your Bitcoins or NXTcoin and having the respective Euro amount sent to PayPal, bank account or other payment processor, but you can actually also buy BTC as well as NXT and even Ethereum’s Ether coins with it.

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Once you register and verify your email address you will be able to start using the service for selling crypto coins for Euro with a daily limit of 1000 Euro, 7500 Euro monthly limit and 30000 EUR total limit, but you will not be able to buy crypto coins. You would need to go through an additional verification process to increase your limits and get the ability to also buy crypto coins, but the good thing is that right after registration you can immediately test the Bitcoin to PayPal functionality or Bitcoin to SEPA wire transfer. Do note that since the service is targeted at European users if you are from another country you might not be able to go through all levels of verification, but you should still not have trouble using the lower limit levels.

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Here are how the different verification levels go and what are the requirements and the limits you get with each of them. Going for the maximum Gold level would give you access to the full functionality offered by the service as well as very high limits for both buying and selling the supported crypto currencies, but in order to pass it you need to verify your identity and provide the respective documents to do that. If you do not require to have high limits and don’t need the functionality for buying crypto coins using the service you can be just fine even with the Starter or Bronze plans. For the Bitcoin to PayPal transfer functionality this should be enough with the standard limits you get, at least for checking the service out to see if it will provide you with what you need in terms of functionality.

When you go to the page to sell Bitcoin (or NXTcoin) for Euro and have the money sent to your bank account or to PayPal you have to set an amount of coins you want to sell. There is a limit of minimum 50 Euro equivalent in coins to initiate a transaction and that goes for both BTC and NXT coins, regardless of where you want to transfer them. After you enter the amount in coins you want to sell you will see the base price per Bitcoin and how much you will receive depending on the payout provider you have chosen (minus the service fee). The SEPA wire transfer comes with the lowest fee and the fee for PayPal transfers is apparently higher as it also takes into account the PayPal fees, do note however that the estimate you get in EUR might be a bit less when you go to the final confirmation page for initiating the Bitcoin to PayPal transaction.

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After you send the BTC to the wallet address you are given you will have to wait for the network confirmation that can normally take up to about 1-2 hours and then you can expect to see a money transaction to PayPal to be initiated. Since the process can take multiple hours to be completed you will also receive an email when the money have been sent to your PayPal account. In our test for sending about 50 EUR (the minimum) converted from Bitcoin to PayPal the total time needed was about three and a half hours from the moment we have initiated the process until we have got the money in our PayPal account. The good thing here is that unlike Bitwala that use PayPal eCheck for the transfers this service does a normal regular transfer and you have the money available immediately in your PayPal account without having to wait for their confirmation. So if you want to be able to quickly and easily transfer Bitcoins to Euro in your PayPal account, then Coinimal is the better solution available from the two services that we have recently tested, though both of them do work pretty much equally well for BTC to SEPA bank transfers.

– If you want to check out the Coinimal Bitcoin to PayPal transfer service yourself…


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