Archive for the ‘Tests and Reviews’ Category

bitwala

Bitwala is an interesting service that makes bank wire transfers on your behalf in exchange for Bitcoins, so that you can pay your bills with BTC for example. It is an European company that currently supports only SEPA bank transfers, so it is usable to send BTC to an European bank account only, though you can send Bitcoins from anywhere in the world. The primary operating currency is Euro (EUR) with only 0.5% fee on the BTC to Euro bank payments, but multiple other currencies are also supported with a higher fee. This makes the service an interesting and fast way to transfer Bitcoin to bank accounts in Europe and that goes not only to convert BTC to Euro in your bank, but also send payments.

bitwala-2

Things just got even more interesting with the service just announcing the addition of support for sending Bitcoins to PayPal accounts as well with the same low 0.5% fee for Euro conversion. This makes it even more interesting for worldwide use and not only for European Bitcoin users like it was before thanks to the BTC to SEPA wire transfers. Since PayPal is the preferred method for payment when using eBay and making other online purchases thanks to the layer of protection that it adds over the use of a credit card directly the ability to quickly and easily convert Bitcoins to Euro and have them in your PayPal account seems like quite a useful feature.

bitwala-3

As soon as you register you will have a monthly limit of 200 Euro, but as soon as you confirm your email address and enter your basic details such as name and address the limit will be increased to 500 Euro. For the next level of 2000 Euro limit you need to provide identity verification documents that are required in order to comply with EU law. For the third level with a monthly limit of 50000 Euro you would need to go through a quick Skype call with a representative from the service. For most people even the first level of verification will be enough to try out the service and see if it will work as well as you would expect it to and if it is something that you might find useful either for paying bills with Bitcoins or for sending BTC to your PayPal account.

bitwala-paypa-echeck-payment

The first test transaction to send Bitcoins using the service to PayPal that we did took us a little over 5 hours from the moment we have initiated the procedure and sent the BTC to the moment we’ve received confirmation that the money have been sent to our PayPal account. Out of those a bit over 5 hours roughly two were needed for the Bitcoin transaction to be confirmed on the network and another three for the PayPal transfer to be initiated. There is a bit of a problem here that we did not see clearly explained with the BTC to PayPal support that the service has introduced and that is the fact that eChecks are being used to fund your PayPal account and while we got a confirmation on the transfer received, the money sent are not immediately available for use like you would probably want them to be. According to PayPal: “This eCheck payment will post to your PayPal balance once the funds have cleared from the sender’s account, which usually takes 3-5 business days” and we have to wait for November 12th for the eCheck payment to be cleared and for us to actually be able to use the funds from within PayPal. Unfortunately this pretty much kills the usability of the service if you have to wait up to a week after you initiate the BTC to PayPal transfer as you probably would want to be able to use the funds withing a few hours, not within days. It will still be faster and more convenient to do a BTC to SEPA wire transfer to the bank account of a card linked to your PayPal account than to take advantage of the Bitcoin to PayPal service!

For more information about Bitwala and to try out the service yourself…

rigs-online

You can say it was about time to see a service for leasing and renting mining rigs for Ethereum and other forks that use the Dagger Hashimoto mining algorithm, so here comes the new service called Rigs Online. Interestingly enough the larger and more established services did not bother to add support for Ethereum hashrate leasing and renting, so somebody else apparently had to do it. The service is still in beta and has a bit limited functionality initially, but it does already work and works pretty good based on our first experiences with it, though there are some issues as well that need to be worked on. Everyone can register and either rent an available mining rig if the price is acceptable or add his own mining rig to sell the extra hashrate he has available. The service accepts Bitcoins only for the payments and when you send coins to your account you will get them available for use just after 1 confirmation, however for the moment there still seems to be no function available to withdraw any earnings or coins left in your balance.

rigs-online-lease-a-rig

When you want to rent a mining rig you choose it from the list of available ones that are not yet rented fill in some details on where you want to have it mine. So far it seems that only Suprnova is supported and you can choose to mine in their ETH, SHF or EXP pools then you need to set a worker you have already set in the respective pool, and the time you want to rent the rig for – can be for less than 24 hours, though the prices are listed in 24 hours. It would probably have been better to just paste the full pool URL for mining than to have just a dropdown, but this is probably to make it possible to have less mistakes. Unfortunately for the moment there is no option to edit the settings once you rent a mining rig, so if you make a mistake in the setting up then you cannot fix it or if you want to switch the pool at some point. Another thing that is not yet very clear is what happens when a rig you have rented for a given time period goes offline before your renting period is over. It is not clear if you will be compensated in any way for the downtime or you will only loose your money, so at if you decide to test the service at the moment do not rent rigs for too long periods. Another thing we are currently missing in the service is a comment for and rating system for rigs, but hopefully we are going to see something like that added in the future as well.

rigs-online-rent-a-rig

If you want to lease the hashrate of your Ethereum mining rig you go through a simple setup process similar to that of the renting of rigs. Here it is very important to setup a default pool URL where your mining rig will be mining at when it is waiting to be rented by somebody. Here you can set a full pool URL with the default example set for Supernova, but you should be able to use different pool as well. Unfortunately with the rig renting here you also don’t have the ability to edit your rig once you set it up, so if you want to change something you need to setup a new mining rig available for renting. After you add your mining rig to sell your hashrate you will need to point the ethminer on that rig to a special URL that will be given to you pointing to the Rigs Online service – apparently a proxy that handles the renting process and switching between your backup pool and the user’s preferred mining pool when the rig is rented.

So in short the Rigs Online service does look promising, however it currently comes with the very basic functionality available and there is a lot of work needed to still be done. It is promising, but still in beta and there is more work needed to be done before it becomes fully functional and offer all the things that you will normally expect from such a service and still the lack of withdraw function is bothering us. So you are welcome to try it, but you should only do it with a small deposits in order to be able to try renting a rig or you can try adding your mining rig as a quick test.

For more information and to try out the new Rigs Online service…

nvidia-geforce-gtx-950-msi

Last week Nvidia has announced a new mid-range GPU, namely the GTX 950 that is being positioned between the GTX 750 Ti and the GTX 960. Interestingly enough the GTX 950 has 128 CUDA cores more than 750 Ti and a TDP of 90W with a price point that is a bit higher than the 750 Ti, so the big question is if the GTX 950 can be the new affordable and low-power usage alternative for mining suceeding the 750 Ti. We took an MSI GeForce GTX 950 Gaming 2G video card and have tested how it performs for crypto mining in various algorithms using the latest ccMiner fork from SP optimized fro Maxwell GPUs as the GTX 950 is Compute 5.2 card. We have also tested using Ethminer for mining Ethereum’s Ether (ETH) coins as these are pretty hot and profitable to mine at the moment.

gtx-950-hashrate-tdp-table

The table above does not contain results for the following algorithms that are supported by ccMiner: lyra2, skein, yescrypt, whirl, x14, x17 as when trying to test them we have encountered errors or the miner software crashing. We are not sure if this is directly related to the use of GTX 950 and the default intensity settings not working for some algorithms, or just that there are issues with the specific algorithms in the latest code of ccMiner. The TDP result shows how much power the video card uses for each of the algorithm with 100% TDP being equal to 90W of power usage on a normal GTX 950, but on the MSI factory overclocked Gaming model the 100% TDP is actually equal to 110W. As you can see however very fee of the algorithms are getting close to the maximum TDP of the GTX 950, so the actual power usage could be even lower than 90W on most of the algorithms.


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