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First Impressions from the TechnoBit DICE ASIC Miner

24, Feb 2015

technobit-dice-miner-1

If you remember back in December last year we have mentioned the announcement of the 150 GHS TechnoBit Dice Desktop USB Miner / Blockchain Lottery Device, based on a single Spondoolies Tech RockerBox ASIC chip. This device caught our attention as it was an affordable solution for enthusiasts and people that are interested in Bitcoin ASICs and mining to get to know things. We were hoping that it will be an affordable, small, silent and easy to setup and use device that could be of interest to home users that are not into Bitcoin mining for profit, but just for fun or out of curiosity. At the beginning of this month we have ordered one unit to try it out ourselves and write a review, it was supposed to be initially shipped on 10th, but then again the date was moved to 19th and a few days later it was finally shipped and we just got it today. Here we need to mention that TechnoBit did not let the users that have ordered it know of the delay, just silently updated the dates their website, though they are quick to respond when you contact them. Thank god that the miner was not time critical as it is not a very powerful in terms of hashrate device, so a bit of a delay is not an issue here, but what about if you order one of their other more powerful miners? And so we got the device, this is actually our first ASIC miner from TechnoBit, although they have been on the market for quite a while and have quite a lot of products that they build themselves based on ASIC chips produced from other companies. So our experience with the DICE is also our first experience with the manufacture as well, what you should know is that the company is based in Bulgaria which is in the European Union, so if you are from an EU country there will be no delivery delays as soon as the item is shipped or additional customs charges.

technobit-dice-miner-2

The DICE was well packaged, we have ordered the version that is only the miner and not the other model that includes a controller, so this one connects directly to a computer via USB and you need to run cgminer. You can of course also use Raspberry Pi or TP-Link controller with custom software if you manage to get them work which brings us to one of the important things regarding the DICE. It is no way a product that is easy to use by novice users and the reason for that is the lack of installation/setup manual and clear details about how to make things work including the miner software you need. So a bit of a disappointment on the ease of use side, here TechnoBit are not doing well at all and you need to look for information on forums, including details of the parameters you need to understand in order to tweak the performance or overclock the device. Another thing that we have noticed as soon as we turned on the DICE is that it is not very silent, though the noise coming from the cooling fan is still quite acceptable. Other than that the build quality seems to be good and the miner looks and feels like a solid product, apparently more suited for advanced users than for normal or novice users. Though once you get the hang of things there should be no more problems using the DICE, we have tried running it on the NiceHash service for a bit already and we are getting higher performance than the initially promised 150-160 GHS, the service reports an average hashrate for 5 minutes in the range of 200-250 GHS and so does cgminer locally. Also Make sure that you use a pool where you can set a fixed difficulty as due to the low hashrate that this device has if the pool you use has difficulty auto adjustment and it gets too high your performance may get lower, using 128 fixed difficulty should normally be fine.

nicehashdice-miner-stats


Quick setup guide for TechnoBit DICE on Windows:
– Download the Windows version of cgminer with support for DICE
– Modify the cgminer.conf file with the pool settings for the pool that you want to mine at
– Download Zadig and run it to replace the unrecognized USB device that you get when you plug the miner with WinUSB driver
– Run the DICE cgminer and it should detect the device and start mining using your pool settings

There is no official source for cgminer with support for DICE available, you need to download the official release and apply a patch to it to add support for the DICE miner. This is for the Linux users as well as the ones that want to use a Raspberry Pi controller for the miner instead of a Windows PC. There is also an official firmware available for the TP-Link controller that you can use as a miner controller, though you probably would want to get a version of the DICE miner with the controller already packaged – this one should in theory be easier to setup and use for novice users. This are pretty much our first impressions from the TechnoBit DICE ASIC miner that we just got and plugged in to test it out if it works. In the next few days we are going to be doing some tests of the device, so stay tuned for additional details and more information in our full review of the unit.

Review of the GAW Miners Hashlet Digital Cloud Miner

19, Aug 2014

gawminers-hashlets

A few days have passed since the introduction of the GAW Miners Digital Cloud Miner – the Hashlet and we’ve been testing it since the sales of the cloud miner have started and we have purchased a 5 MHS Hashlet. So now it is time to do a report on our experience using the miner and of course the thing that probably most of you are wondering about – the profitability you can expect. We already have some numbers to share, even though at the moment the Litecoin and other Scrypt-based crypto coins are not very stable in terms of price and the trend if going down and not up. With the current unstable market situation you need to be careful and wise when doing a decision to invest into a mining service or ASIC miner, unless you believe that things will soon improve and the prices will get back up as many people into crypto currencies do.

hashlet-zencloud-dashboard

After purchasing a 5 MHS Hashlet, a relatively quick and easy process, though it sometimes might take a bit more time than we needed, we have moved to activating our hashrate in the ZenCloud website. The ZenCloud service is that is also used by GAW Miners for the hosted ASIC miners, including the Scrypt and SHA-256 devices, however since we haven’t used the service before it is new for us. If you have purchased a hosted miner you may already be familiar with the service and how it operates, but we’ll go through the important things for the people that are new to it like us. One very important thing to note is that the Hashlet is a digital cloud miner for mining Scrypt crypto currencies in a multipool and you are getting paid in Bitcoins.

The main Dashboard panel is the place where you get all of the basic details that you need when you login to your account – information such as the current hashrate or what was the last payout that you got. Do note that the Hashlet gets current and hourly hashrate reported, however the generated payment is credited to your account once every 24 hours. The Dashboard page gives you the total amount of coins earned for the last 24 hours, however the actual amount you get is a bit lower due to this number not reflecting the deduction of the maintenance fees. On to top right of every page you can see what is the current amount of BTC you have in your account since the last payment and their average USD value based on the current Coinbase exchange rate.

hashlet-zencloud-miners

The Miners panel from the menu on the left is where you actually add the Hashlet that you have purchased by redeeming the ZenHardware code that you have received and then you get to see the Hashlet you have purchased, but unless you set a mining pool it will not start to mine. Setting a mining pool could be a bit confusing at first as you need to drag the pool icon from the Altcoin list of pools on the right over the Hashlet, or you can use the Batch Update pools if you have more than one Hashlet to make it easier.

Once you drag the pool icon over tha Hashlet, below you will see the icon of the pool appear and the expected daily payout from that pool based on the estimation for your hashrate from the previous day. Obviously the highest payout is the ZenPool as GAW Miners have promised, but you can alternatively select to use Clever Mining, Multipool.us, NiceHash, TradeMyBit or WafflePool as alternatives. The important thing here however is that regardless of which pool you choose you are not setting worker information and you are only getting paid in BTC directly, so you cannot mine some altcoins and get them in your account with the Hashlet – only direct Bitcoin payments. Below you can see what are the current 24 hour estimated for 5 MHS Hashlet with the different supported pools.

5 MHS Hashlet Current Pool Profitability per 24 hours:

Clever Mining – 0.00237291 BTC
Multipool.us – 0.00218895 BTC
NiceHash – 0.00251380 BTC
TradeMyBit – 0.00230103 BTC
WafflePool – 0.00245989 BTC
ZenPool – 0.00309374 BTC

These numbers show that the ZenPool gives a bit over 20% higher profit as compared to the second most profitable pool in the list, and how exactly do they manage to get the extra profit apart from the lack of pool fee we do not know. Do note that these numbers represent the expected profit without the maintenance fee, so what you actual get credited in your account may be less. You can however also get more depending on the price fluctuations on the specific day of mining, especially if the prices the previous day were low. Even though we seem to be seeing pretty close numbers from day to day so far.

hashlet-zencloud-balance

The Latest Activity panel is kind of history log on what have you been doing in the control panel, logging the time and the action you have performed. The next panel called Balance is that one you will want to use more often as it shows the list of your financial transactions – the mined coins and the maintenance fee. It can be a bit confusing as it apparently shows first the maintenance feed deducted and then the full amount of mined coins added the same as in the Latest Activity. This way it seems that for the first day we have not been deducted any fee, even though we have mined for just a few hours as you can also see from the amount of mined coins.

The Balance panel is also the place where you can either deposit or withdraw BTC in your account. Both buttons however do have some weird rounding applied as per the current Coinbase exchange rate that makes entering an exact value real pain in the ass, and while it may be useful when depositing BTC, it is really annoying when withdrawing as you want to enter an exact value that you have in your account. If you are wondering why you would need to add BTC in your account, the reason is simple – to purchase more Hashlets from the ZenMarket panel instead of going through the standard purchasing procedure that you need to go over if you do not yet have a ZenCloud account.

hashlet-maintenance-cost

We’ve been talking about the fee, but we have not yet mentioned what exactly is the maintenance fee that you need to pay for the Hashlet digital cloud miner. It has been set to $0.08 USD per MHS per day, so for our 5 MHS Hashlet we need to pay 40 USD cents per day for the fee from our total mined coins. Our profit for the first day of mining (only a few hours actually) was lower than $0.40, however we were not deducted a fee for that day and after that for the next two days we have managed to get the fee to be about 1/4 of the total mined coins or with other words close to 25% with the current not so favorable Scrypt prices. Obviously since the Hashlet is not time limited cloud mining contract, the time that it should expire is when the mined coins are not enough to cover the fees as this would make the miner unprofitable and you would not want to actually have to pay to be able to continue mining instead of making money from it. This is the way we understand and expect things to go with the Hashlet as this piece of information regarding the lifetime of the digital miner is not clearly described by GAW Miners yet.

Below you can see what the actual earnings are by days that we have accumulated in our account from mining so far with the 5 MHS Hashlet. Note that these are the values with the maintenance fee already deducted from them. The first number in BTC represents the total account balance after that specific day, the number with plus in the brackets shows the actual mined coins for the specific day other than the first one (this is minus the fee) and in the end of the line you can see the average estimated USD price of the available coins.

Day 1 (only few hours of mining)
– 0.00061710 BTC ~ 0.31 USD

Day 2
0.00314709 BTC (+ 0.00252999 BTC) ~ 1.48 USD

Day 3
0.00580333 BTC (+ 0.00265624 BTC) ~ 2.83 USD

Day 4
0.00825451 BTC (+ 0.00245118 BTC) ~ 3.90 USD

Day 5
0.01116123 BTC (+ 0.00290672 BTC) ~ 5.84 USD

Day 6
0.01366939 BTC (+ 0.00250816 BTC) ~ 6.92 USD

Day 7
0.01627877 BTC (+ 0.00260938 BTC) ~ 8.27 USD

So the current actual profit for 5 MHS Hashlet is equivalent to about 1.20-1.30 USD per day after we deduct the maintenance fee from the mined coins. That would mean we’ll need around 65 days (a little over 2 months) to get a return of the investment of $79.99 USD for purchasing the 5 MHS Hashlet if the conditions remain the same – something that will hardly happen. We already know that the network difficulty will most likely continue to increase, but what we don’t know yet is what is going to happen with the price of LTC and other Scrypt-based crypto currencies in the next 2-3 months. So in fact we can ROI faster or slower than that number of days, depending on a lot of factors, but breaking even in just about 2-3 months does not sound like a bad thing as after that you can expect to actually make some profit. How much actually depends on the purchased hashrate and the current market conditions when you have earned enough to cover your initial investment. Do note however that since you are getting paid in BTC, if the Bitcoin exchange rate for example doubles you can instantly lower the time for ROI, but if the opposite thing happens the time will double. And as we usually do recommend, do not invest more than you can afford to lose if things do not go the way you planned it. It is also not a wise idea to invest all in just one place, so think about spreading to multiple services.

– For more information about the Hashlet Digital Cloud Miner by GAW Miners…

Test and Review of the LeaseRig Service Providing Mining Rigs for Rent

21, Feb 2014

leaserig-mining-rigs-for-hire

LeaseRig is an interesting new service that allows you to rent mining rigs for a limited time period that will mine for you in your preferred pool and your preferred crypto currency for the duration of the lease. There are mining rigs available for Scrypt, SHA-256, Scrypt-Jane, Keccak (SHA-3), Scrypt-A-nFactor and DRKMix (Darkxoin mining). These rigs are provided by users and the service LeaseRig only connects you to the mining rig providers, processing payments and acts as control and monitoring panel. Everything seems very quick and easy to start using the service if you want to rent mining rigs and there are already quite a few available, and we were very excited at first. This is precisely why we have decided to give the service a try by renting a mining rig for 24 hours to be able to actually test how things are working and give you adequate feedback and to make a proper review of the service.

rig-leased-for-24-hours

In order to test the service we have decided to lease a smaller mining rig for longer period of time, so we choose one that is with 0.62 MHS and have rented it for 24 hour time period. The cost for leasing the rig for 24 hours was 0.01070000 BTC (you can pay only in BTC), and estimating the LTC return rate for 24 hours of mining Litecoin with that hashing power was roughly 0.1945 LTC (0.00485666 BTC). This means if we used the rig to mine LTC the profit we would get will be about half of what we have payed for renting the mining rig, so we have decided to go for the currently more profitable DOGE. The projected mined crypto with that hasrate for a day by the pool (Coinotron) was about 2600-2700 DOGE or up to about 0.00567000 BTC with the current exchange rate. Again less than what we have to pay for renting the mining rig, but we decided to give it a try as we were actually willing to test the service… you can find better prices for higher hashrate and with longer lease time you can end up with profit according to calculations.

rig-leased-for-24-hours-2

Everything started very good, the BTC deposit has appeared and was available for use very fast. We have hired the mining rig, removed the rigs default pool settings and set our pool and worker settings for mining DOGE at Coinotron and in a moment the rig started working. For a few hours everything was running smooth and problem free, so we stopped checking the Mining Rig status every few minutes and a few more hours later we checked to see if everything is still fine and it was not. The mining pools and settings were back to the default ones for the mining rig we have rented and it was not mining to our pool (it was gone from the list of pool) and was mining for the rig owner with more than 12 hours left from our contract. This has probably continued for an hour or two at least before we have noticed it, we again changed the pool settings to ours for mining DOGE in Coinotron and have removed the default ones. After that going for some sleep and waking up in the morning and checking the status with just about 2 hours more left from our lease the rig was again back to the default pools and our mining pool info was not in the list and it was not mining for us. This meant that again the rented rig was not mining for us for at least a few hours, again setting the proper settings for the remaining time of our contract and there were no more problems until the lease time has finished.

leaserig-coinotron-actual-mined-doge

The result from our 24 hour rent of the mining rig was really awful. Instead for the projected 2600-2700 DOGE getting mined for the lease time, we ended up with only about half of that actually mined or about 1300 DOGE. This means that due to the two times that our pool settings were gone and the mining rig was not mining for as as per the contract before us noticing has totaled in probably 12 hours. This is really unacceptable, even though after our contract has finished we can still see the leased mining rig mining for us at the Coinotron pool with a slightly lower hashrate for about an hour already we are still not happy at all.

After reading a bit more, it seems that the problem with the pool settings getting reverted back to the default set by the mining rig operator can happen if you restart the miner on the rig and you need to manually reset them to your own settings each time. So if the mining rig does not get restarted or the miner software on it at least you might not have the problem with the pools reverting back to the owner of the rig, but in hour 24 hour test we have noticed this happening 2 times (maybe even more) and thus resulting in really very unsatisfactory performance of the service. You cannot expect the people that rent the rigs to be monitoring them all the time during the lease period, especially if you rent multiple rigs and for longer periods of time in order to quickly react should a problem with the pools reverting form the user set ones to the rig’s defaults.

The conclusion: we have started by renting a 0.62 MHS mining rig for 24 hours paying 0.01070000 BTC, we have mined Scrypt crypto and more specifically DOGE as it has higher profitability than LTC and at the end of our lease we have ended up with the equivalent of 0.00252630 BTC. So we actually have payed 4 times more than what our actual mining earnings are worth and that is clearly not going to make us recommend the LeaseRig service. We have ended up with half of the expected DOGE mined because of a problem with the system that reverts the mining pools to the mining rig’s defaults instead of using our mining pool and worker, so this has essentially halved our expected earnings. So for now you better not go for the LeaseRig service, until at least they figure a solution to the problem with the pools getting reset. But even without that pool issue we have experienced it is hard to go for a lease of a rig that will not only cover what you have payed for renting it, but will end up with some profit for you! You could actually be more interested in becoming one of the mining rig providers and earn some cash for leasing your mining rig equipment, because this actually seems more profitable than to be renting rigs.

Other similar services offering Renting of Mining Rigs or Hashrate:
– MiningRigRentals
– Nicehash


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