Archive for the ‘Tests and Reviews’ Category

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If you were looking for the Litecoin alternative of the CEX.io Bitcoin cloud mining and trading service then you may not have to wait much more. We have just found out about a new service that looks and functions very much like CEX, however it is designed only for LTC cloud mining. This new service that has launched just a few days ago is called Markets CX and has started just about a week ago with a month before that for closed beta testing according to the available information. It seems that the service is based somewhere in Asia and to be more precise in mainland China according to the not so man details published about the operation. Furthermore the cloud mining hashrate being offered is apparently provided by 5-chip Gridseed ASIC devices and there is even an option to redeem your cloud mining hashrate for actual hardware (300 KHS per device).

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Of course we have decided to give the service a try as something new and interesting in our search for a good Litecoin cloud mining service. It seems like the most promising and well made from what we have tried for mining Litecoin, so we have decided to start by depositing 5 LTCs and purchasing Scrypt mining hashrate with them. We started with 1 LTC initially just to test and soon after that moved another ~4 Litecoins and the total hashrate we have purchased with them was about 120 KHS. We liked that the deposit confirmations require only 3 confirmations on the network, so you can quickly have the LTCs available on the exchange to buy hashrate with. The current price per 1 KHS is 0.0410 LTC with already over 40000 KHS (40 MHS) available on the exchange, so there is plenty of hashrate available for sale at the moment. We however do recommend to start small as we did and we usually do with new services that we are trying out and if everything works well out for you you can later on buy more hashrate. The good news is that we already got a few hourly earnings credited to our account and we can withdraw them, though we’ll probably reinvest them for more hashrate. We expect that soon the exchange rate will start to get higher as currently the available on the market KHS are probably offered by the service provider at a lower rate and with more demand the price will start to get high. This will allow you to buy now cheaper and sell more expensive later on to get some extra profit if you do not want to invest on the long run.

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And while this new service for LTC cloud mining does seem to look very similar to CEX.io the two are not run by the same people. This new Litecoin cloud mining platform does not yet have a public mining pool where you can mine with your own hardware, or even some real time information about what and how your purchased cloud mining hashrate is performing. For the moment you can only see every hour what your earnings are on the account Balance page, so there is more to be desired here, especially considering that this piece of information is not well described and you need to figure it out by yourself.

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Markets CX does offer a Mining Profit calculator that can give you an idea about when you can expect to break even in. The average return of investment according to the profit calculator is 6-7 months and that does sound pretty good, but the time required to get your invested LTC back can vary. The maintenance fee for the cloud mining hashrate you purchase is currently 7.5% and you can see how much from your earnings are deducted each hour when you get your mining profit credited to your account. So far we are excited by the potential we see in this Litecoin cloud mining service, so we do recommend to take a look at it if you are interested in LTC cloud mining. You can try it out with just a few KHS like we did and we’ll keep you updated on our experience and results from using this new Litecoin cloud mining and trading service. Note that we do recommend to proceed with caution though and not invest a lot of coins initially and give the service some time to prove itself first!

For more information about the Markets CX Litecoin cloud mining service and to try it out…

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The Bit Mining cloud mining service for LTC and BTC recently had some technical issues that caused about a day of downtime, but it seems that the website is now back online and working. We’ve been using the service for just a few days starting with the purchase of 100 KHS of Litecoin cloud mining hashrate and the earnings from mining that we get every 24 hours we are reinvesting into buying more KHS (the service even offers automation by setting a percent for reinvestment of earnings). At the moment there are still things that apparently haven’t been restored yet, for example the trading functionality of the website is not yet operational, and some users are reporting that they are not seeing the purchased hashrate. The support however reassures that everything will be restored back to normal soon as apparently they’ve had some serious problem. Meanwhile if you are having problems logging in, then try resetting your password and login with the new one.

Another important thing that you should be aware of if you are interested in purchasing cloud mining hashrate at Bit Mining is that when you place a sell order of hashrate you have purchased it will not be mining for you ether until you cancel the order or you sell the hashrate. If you have used another alternative service for cloud mining scuh as CEX.io for example, you might expect that even the hashrate “locked” in trading is going to mine for you, but here apparently it does not.

In our ongoing tests of the Bit Mining we have also decided to try to mine with local hashrate at the pools available. The good thing here is that you can not only cloud mine, but also mine with mining hardware that you own physically at the same terms (minus maintenance fee for non cloud hashrate). However either there were some problems with the pool or you need to mine for 24 hours (or at least to be still mining when the payout happens) in order to get your earnings. We have mined with a BTC ASIC for a few hours at the pool and it was reporting hashrate and expected earnings, but as soon as we’ve stopped the miners we got 0 for Daily Payout reported and when the actual daily payout happened we got nothing for the time we spent mining. Ths could’ve been a bug, or something that is not very well documented, but we do advice to test first yourself with some low hashrate, before leaving all your miners pointed at the Bit Mining pools. For now we are going to be focusing mostly on testing the cloud mining functionality of the service and we are going to report how things go as we continue using the service.

Aside from the technical issues from the last 24 hours that Bit Mining is currently experiencing, the service worked pretty well for the few days we’ve been testing it. There were a few times when the website was loading a bit slower, but we were getting our payouts on time and had no issues in general aside from not getting anything from spending some time mining with an ASIC in their BTC pool. On the other hand the website’s interface and functionality could be improved as at the moment there are a few things that are not very user friendly, including the trading functionality. But we’ll see how things go from now on, at least the support is here and replying to users about their problems and it seems that issues are actually being worked on unlike in some other similar services. And we’ve had a fair share of issues with almost all cloud mining services that we’ve tried so far and the only one that seems to be holding up really well with no issues experienced for the last two weeks that we’ve been testing it is PBmining.

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Cloud mining is becoming more and more interesting alternative for mining not only Bitcoins, but for Litecoins as well. With the significant increase of the BTC network hashrate and difficulty cloud mining is getting more and more interesting alternative to buying ASIC devices and waiting for them to arrive, to setup them and to support them. Services such as CEX.io that offer you to buy Bitcoin mining hahrate in the cloud have generated a lot of attention and have attracted a lot of users. However the price per GHS there is quite high to just purchase GHS and mine Bitcoins with it on the long run, so we have been looking into new services that have better prices and options for cloud mining. We are already testing the PBmining BTC cloud mining service that offers the best price for long term investment into Bitcoin mining hashrate with the reason being that there is no exchange to trade it at, it is yours for 5 years. But we are also looking for Scrypt cloud mining services as these are still new and not many, due to the fact that Scrypt mining is still done mostly on GPU and there are still no very powerful ASIC devices available to replace the GPU for mining. So we have found another interesting service called Bit Mining that gives you the ability to purchase both SHA-256 (BTC) cloud mining hashrate as well as Scrypt (LTC) mining cloud hashrate. But what really caught our attention was the recent announcement that the service has partnered with Bitmaintech, the only company still shipping relatively powerful SHA-256 ASIC devices that are on stock. We have made a comparison between 180 GHS AntMiner S1 vs 180 GHS Cloud Mining Contract that you might be interested to check out.

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Bit Mining offers cloud mining BTC and LTC hashrate and there is an exchange where you can purchase GHS for Bitcoin mining with BTC as well as KHS for Littecoin mining with LTC. The price of SHA-256 cloud mining hashrate is currently about 0.017 BTC per GHS which is lower than the current exchange rate at CEX.io that is about 0.0197 BTC per GHS, but is almost twice higher than on PBmining where the current price is 0.0089 BTC per GHS (for a long term contract though, meaning you cannot sell it on an exchange). At the moment there are about 4537 GHS available for trade on the exchange, so significantly lower than on other cloud mining services with their own exchanges, but still more than enough for many people to get into cloud mining with a small investment just to try it out. So if you want to purchase 100 GHS Bitcoin cloud mining hashrate at Bit Mining you will have to pay for it about 1.7 BTC.

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Moving onto Scrypt cloud mining for LTC, you will have to pay with Litecoins for the hashrate (the exchange does have BTC/LTC trading as well, though not very active at the moment). Bit Mining currently sells on their exchange the Scrypt cloud mining hashrate for about 0.0745 LTC per GHS, or with other words 100 KHS will cost you about 7.5 LTC. With the current exchange rate of LTC per USD a 700 KHS hashrate that is pretty much equivalent to a clocked Radeon R9 280X video card will cost you about $900 USD. So significantly more expensive than getting the video card, but without any need to setup and maintain hardware or to pay for electricity etc. At this moment the cloud mining hashrate available on the Bit Mining exchange is about 2270 KHS, so not that much actually, but more than enough to start testing the service and as more hasrate is added if you are happy with the results you can get more.

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What we did for starters was to purchase 100 KHS of Scrypt mining hashrate about 2 days ago as apart of our test of the service and so far we are satisfied with the results. Even though we are seeing some things that still need some more work, mostly polishing the user interface and adding some useful extra functionality of the service itself. Things however do seem very promising and the hashrate prices are better than on some other cloud mining services with trading exchanges with good potential for growth. Bit Mining is paying out your earnings on a 24 hour basis and we have already received two payments from our purchased hashrate, so we can either withdraw them or reinvest them into more hashrate, there is even an option to set a percentage of your earning to be automatically reinvested into hashrate (something that is missing in most other cloud mining services).

Another interesting thing about the Bit Mining cloud mining service is that it also has its own pools that you can point your actual BTC and LTC mining hardware to mine at the same pool where you have the purchased cloud mining hashrate. You can actually mine at the LTC and BTC mining pools even if you don’t have any cloud mining hashrate and to invest your earnings into some cloud mining hashrate or just withdraw the earnings. The service has a 0% fee P2Pool node with a special feature – paying miners not based upon how many blocks are found, but based upon only how much work each miner does for both BTC and LTC mining. So if you mine with 100 GH for 1 day, you will receive exactly 0.013180047005724 BTC at the end of the day at the current difficulty. And if you mine with 100 KS for 1 day, you will receive exactly 0.027659086465469 LTC at the end of the day at the current difficulty. This makes it easier to do the numbers and see how much it will take to get a full return of your investment into cloud mining hashrate, though you will still have to take into account the variation of the difficulty increasing over time. If you are wondering what are the fees for the cloud mining hashrate, there is 6% SHA256 maintenance fee and 10% SCRYPT maintenance fee. There is also a 1% sale fee, which will be deducted from the earnings from your sale of hashrate on the marketplace, no fee when buying KHS or GHS.

So far what we could recommend is if you are interested to try out the service by purchasing a small amount of hashrate and see how things go for a few days and then decide to invest into more or not, this is exactly what we are doing already with out 100 KHS purchased Scrypt mining hashrate. For now we are more interested in the LTC cloud mining functionality of the service, but we are probably going to invest a bit in the BTC mining hashrate even though PBmining is our preferred choice for the moment for Bitcoin cloud mining where we have already uppded our cloud mining hashrate to 10 GHS for the next week of testing the service from the initial 1 GHS that we started with for the first week of testing the service. But it is up to you to decide to check out only the Scrypt cloud mining or the SHA-256 cloud mining hashrate as well that the service offers.

For more information about the Bit Mining BTC/LTC cloud mining service…


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