Archive for the ‘Tests and Reviews’ Category

Some Thoughts About CEX.io Bitcoin Cloud Mining and Exchange Service

14, Feb 2014

cex-io-cloud-mining-and-exchange

We’ve been using the CEX.io services for a while already and have decided to share some of our experience and tips and tricks in order to help you get the best out of the service if you are using it or plan to use it at some point. The idea behind CEX is that you can purchase BTC ASIC hashrate in the cloud, so that the purchased GHS will start mining Bitcoins immediately for you. CEX.io also has an exchange where you actually buy and sell hashrate – GHS for BTC or NMC, and also can trade LTC/BTC and NMC/BTC. The service also includes the Ghash.io BTC mining pool where your cloud hashrate is mining for you, and if yuo have physical Bitcoin miners you can also point them to that pool to mine coins for you – the pool fee is 0% and currently this is the largest of the BTC mining pools.

cex-io-cloud-mining-and-exchange-2

The fact that you don’t actually buy GHS at a fixed price, but instead you can purchase hashrate at the current market price is both a good and a bad thing. Due to the fact that there is an exchange available you need to trade BTC or NMC for GHS in order to get some hasrate to mine for you, so you can expect the price you will have to pay for 1 GHS to be 2-3 times higher than what you would pay for a physical Bitcoin ASIC. The good thing with cloud mining at CEX.io is that you can easily and quickly sell your hashrate at the exchange at any time. The bad thing is that there is a very high chance that in a few days or weeks of time the exchange rate per GHS will most likely be lower than the rate at you purchased. This is happening because of the constantly increasing difficulty of the Bitcoin network, and as a result the rate at which your cloud hashrate is mining coins for you will also drop in time. This makes it not worthwhile to invest in GHS on the long run expecting that you will end up with profit from what you have mined with the purchased hasrate after you sell the gigahashes you purchased on the exchange in a while.

bitcoinwisdom-ghs-btc-cex-io

What you should consider to do if you plan on using CEX.io effectively is to trade GHS on the exchange (there is a 0% fee for trades on that exchange) and while you are trading them the purchased hasrate will generate you some extra profit as it will mine for Bitcoins. This is simply the best and most profitable option that will give you the chance to make some extra profit, though it will require you to have some trading knowledge and experience in order to do the right decisions on the exchange. It is not a wise idea to look for automated trading solution to help you in trading such as the Cryptotrader platform that we’ve reviewed recently unless you really know what you are going to do with it. On the other hand the use of some sort of market indicators such as EMA can help you in making the right decisions at the right time. You can find a good source for technical analysis of the GHS market at Bitcoinwisdom, but be careful with these indicators as well as they can only help you identify the market trends and not guarantee you anything.

– For more information about the CEX.io Bitcoin cloud mining and exchange…

Testing and Reviewing the BTC Robot Automated Bitcoin Trading Robot

13, Feb 2014

btc-robot-intro

With the constant release of newer and faster Bitcoin ASIC miners and the increase of mining difficulty it is getting harder and harder for the average person interested in crypto currencies to mine BTC. So the alternative of making profit from Bitcoin trading instead of mining them is becoming more and more attractive to normal people and to people that are not the typical traders with experience from Forex or Stock trading. So these people, and not only they, are looking for different tools to help them in trading Bitcoins on the currently available crypto exchanges. We’ve already tested and reviewed some of the available tools, such as Cryptotrader and Butter Bot, sharing our experience and thoughts about them. We just started testing another similar product called BTC Robot that has been available for a while already, so you can expect us to start sharing our usage experience from this automated Bitcoin trading solution in the next days here on the blog.

Meanwhile we are going to talk a bit more about the product and what are our first thoughts about it after starting to use it, something that may help you understand what to expect as the website of the BTC Robot software somewhat lacks a lot of details. What we saw as information available about the software is what would be useful to people that are new into Bitcoin and all that crypto currency stuff, but want to see what the hype is all about and of course want to make some money out of the whole thing. There is not much information about where, how and what this automated Bitcoin trading bot will do and how it will trade and this is what people that are into BTC and cryptos would want to know about the BTC Robot software, before going for it. So while this trading bot may appeal to the average person it won’t seem very attractive for the people that are into crypto currency already, though this does not mean that it will not be useful for these people as well. What we’ll try to give you here is the information that you cannot find on the introductory page and you can learn only after you start using the trading software and later on, in the next few days, we’ll share our results with what trades the robot does…

btc-robot-silver-plan

In order to be able to use the BTC Robot automated Bitcoin trading robot you will need to purchase it. Unfortunately there is no trial version available that you could try, before you buy, however there is an alternative option present – 60 days money back guarantee. This means that you can try the software for 60 days and if you are not happy with the results you can get your money back, suggesting that the makers of the software are very certain that you will be satisfied by the results and keep using the software. There are three different plans that will give you access to the automated trading system. The Silver Plan that will give you a downloadable version of the software that you need to install and run on your computer available for $149 USD with a one-time license fee and no extra subscriptions or fees. We’ve got for this version of the product, but bear in mind that you would need to have it installed on a computer running 24/7 with a stable Internet connection in order to get the best possible results when the software runs from your computer. The second option is called the Gold Plan and is available for $248 USD that includes the access to the trading software installed on a VPS (in the cloud) for a one year. This means that you get access through your browser and the trading will be on all the time without having to run it on your computer and have the system on all the time, the disadvantage here is that you will have to renew the VPS service after 1 year. The third option called Platinum Plan will cost you $498 USD and will give you access to the trading software installed on a VPS (in the cloud) server three years. The Platinum plan also includes a LTC Robot, a Litecoin trading robot as a bonus, though you can also get a separate license for it as well. We may also test the Litecoin trading robot in the future if we are satisfied with the results we get from the Bitcoin trading system.

btc-robot-bitcoin-trading-robot

Back to the BTC Robot automated Bitcoin trading robot and what you actually get with it. As soon as you install and run it, or when you access it on a VPS server, you will get a simple and easy to use interface with the trading settings and profit and Bitcoin pricing information available. The software is designed to use the BTC-E exchange and trades only the BTC/USD exchange pair there, so you will need to have an account in that crypto currency exchange already in order to use the trading bot. In order for the robot to be able to trade you will need to generate an API key for it at the BTC-E exchange, you can find that option in the settings panel of the exchange. The only other thing you need to select is the trading aggressiveness of the software based on the risk/reward expectations you have, you can select between Conservative, Medium and Aggressive mode or use your own custom settings.

Other than that you have a graph for your balance and profit and about how the BTC exchange rate is going not only on BTC-E, but also on MtGox and Bitstamp, though the bot only trades on BTC-E. According to the developers of the software you can can make anywhere from 5% to 100% profit per month depending on the market situation and your trading settings. The more volatile the market the higher profit you can make, but if the market is flat then there could be some periods of slow action and that is completely normal to expect. Once the bot starts making trades you will see the Buy and Sell actions listed on the right under the Last Operations section, though we still haven’t seen any trades on our end, but we’ve just started using the robot.

We have started our testing of the BTC Robot automated Bitcoin trading robot with a small amount of BTC in our BTC-E account in order to get a feel of the product and in case of not seeing good results not to loose money. The trading mode we have selected is Aggressive as we are willing to risk a bit more with the chance of higher profitability, so stay tuned for more information in the next few days as the trading software starts doing some trades.

– For more about the BTC Robot automated Bitcoin trading robot and to try it out…

Bitmain AntMiner U1 USB Bitcoin ASIC Power Usage and Performance

12, Feb 2014

antminer-u1-idle-power-consumption

If you are using Bitmain AntMiner U1 USB Bitcoin ASIC miners there is something important that you should be well aware of in order to get the maximum performance and ensure optimal stability on the long run for these devices. Obviously we are going to be talking about power consumption and usage of these small ASIC miners that are designed to be powered by USB. The manufacturer has rated them at 2 watt power consumption from the USB port with a hasrate of 1.6 GH/s and tha is leaving you about 0.5W headroom for overclocking before reaching the maximum power that a normal USB 2.0 port can provide you with. But we decided to check if the Bitmain rating is rally true and to see for ourselves what is the actual power consumption of the AntiMiner U1 devices. As you can see on the photo above the power usage of the U1 miner is just 0.086A at 5V or a total of 0.43 watts is what you get with the device connected to a PC, but with no mining software running.

antminer-u1-cool-hot-power-consumption

As soon as you fire up cgminer or another compatible mining software and the AntMiner U1 starts working at 1.6 GH/s the power consumption increases significantly that what you get in idle mode. At first we’ve measured 0.385A current used or about 1.925 watts – a bit below the manufacturer’s rating, however this is the power usage while the device is still cool. Just a few minutes later since everything gets hotter (thermal images) after the AntMiner U1 starts operating and the power usage increases along with the temperature of the chips. In just about 10 minutes after starting to mine with the device the current usage increases to 0.405A or a total of 2.025W of power, something that does not seem that much higher at first, but as you start to overclock the device you will notice that the gap between a well cooled AntMiner U1 and a very hot miner increases. The problem is that the higher power consumption leads to more heat and can also result in less performance when overclocking.

Here are the results we’ve got as a power consumption of the AntMiner U1 device connected on a USB 2.0 port. Have in mind that USB 2.0 ports have a standard limit on maximum current they can provide to a connected device of 0.5A or 2.5W in total and this can lead to lower performance you can get when overclocking as you might be hitting the interface power limit and not the device’s:

1.6 GH/s – 0.405A
1.8 GH/s – 0.456A
2.0 GH/s – 0.505A
2.2 GH/s – ~~~~~~

We have moved the AntMiner U1 to a USB port to contnue with our overclocking experiments. Have in mind that USB 3.0 ports have an increased limit of the current they can supply to a device of 0.9A at 5V or 4.5W of power, so we could continue to overclock the USB ASIC further:

2.2 GH/s – 0.568A
2.4 GH/s – 0.633A
2.6 GH/s – 0.701A
2.8 GH/s – ~~~~~~

As you can see from the results above hitting 2.2 GH/s on a USB 2.0 port was not possible as we were hitting the limit of the power the interface can provide already at 2 GH/s. Moving to USB 3.0 we could squeeze up to 2.6 GH/s by increasing the operating frequency of the device and having more power available to use from the USB port. Have in mind that overclocking the device requires an adequate cooling to be provided, so you need to be prepared for that before starting to go past the “stock” 1.6 GH/s hashrate. As you can see from our results the maximum we could get was below the maximum power the USB 3.0 interface can provide, the reason for that is that for higher performance you would also have to increase the voltage that the processor of the device operates at (default 0.8V) in order for it to continue working fine at a higher frequency. This can be done by replacing two resistors on the device and the procedure is described in the AntMiner U1 manual. Have in mind though that increasing the voltage can damage the device, so do have in mind should you decide to go for a hardware modification for even higher performance. Increasing the voltage will also seriously increase the power consumption and will require even better cooling in order not to overheat the miner!

– To download the Bitmain AntMiner U1 manual for additional details about overclocking…


top