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How Easy is to Get Yourself a GAW Miners Hashlet
17, Aug 2014
After the initial announcement of the new Hashlet Digital Cloud Miner by GAW Miners there has been a lot of user interest and when the prices were also announced and the sales have started the interest was so big that the users managed to bring down the whole Shopify network temporary. After that issue was quickly resolved and things were back to normal we have decided to try out how easy is it to purchase a Hashlet and then to do a detailed review of the digital cloud miner as well. But first we are going to do a quick overview of our experience purchasing a Hashlet and since the testing and reporting part will need some more time we are going to post the review a bit later on when we do get enough experience and some results with the Hashlet.
The Hashlet is essentially cloud mining hashrate for Scrypt mining that mines for you in a multipool to maximize profit and you get paid in Bitcoin. Currently the price per 1 MHS of hashrate for a Hashlet can be purchased for $15.99 USD, with a minimum of 1 MHS and a maximum of 100 MHS packages, though you can also purchase multiple Hashlet units with a hashrate of 1, 5, 15, 25, 50, 75 or 100 megahashes. Remember that this is Scrypt hashrate not SHA-256 hashrate like most other cloud mining services sell in Gigahashes (GHS), here the hashrate and profitability is different as compared to directly mining BTC with a cloud mining service. The Hashlet is designed to be a digital cloud miner for Scrypt mining in a multipool giving you the maximum profit directly converted in Bitcoins. This is utilized by mining for the most profitable Scrypt-based crypto currency for the moment and then exchanging it for BTC, so this way you can get the maximum from the current market prices. The disadvantage is that you cannot mine coins that you decide and you cannot get paid in a specific coin like you can with an ASIC miner for example.
So when you decide on the hashrate of the Hashlet you want to purchase you add it to the cart, for the purpose of our initial testing we have decided to go with 5 MHS Hashlet, so we have added it to the cart and confirmed that we want to purchase it. We have entered our Billing details and have selected to pay with Bitcoins, though you can also choose to pay with a Credit Card or with a Bank Wire Transfer as well.
Then we were presented with payment page with 2D Barcode as well as the amount of BTC and the address we needed to send the coins to. The number of coins for the $79.99 USD payment we needed to send for the 5 MHS Hashlet was automatically calculated as 0.16116 BTC with the current Bitcoin price. The payment page had a counter that gave us 15 minutes to initiate the payment and as soon as we sent the transfer from our wallet the page refreshed and said that the payment has been accepted. So this is just to send the payment, not to wait for 6 confirmations before your order and payment gets accepted.
What followed next was a bit confusing as the payment page just said that the payment has been completed and nothing more on what to do or where to go. We expected that we need to wait some more for the Bitcoin transaction to be confirmed before we received further instructions. About 15 minutes later with just 3 confirmations of the Bitcoin transfer confirmed we have received an email with further instructions. We were directed to register a ZenCloud account if we don’t yet have one and got a ZenHardware activation code that we needed to redeem at the ZenMiner website in order to activate our Hashlet. The account registration panel did require the activation code, however it did not automatically activate the Hashlet in our account, we needed to redeem the code inside the control panel after we have registered an account in order to have the 5 MHS Hashlet active and then to also select the pool that we wanted to mine in. Of course we have chosen the ZenPool as it was reporting to give the highest profit as we have been promised for the Hashlet, though we’ve had some other popular multipools available as alternatives as well.
We are going to soon post about our experience using the Hashlet and what profitability you can expect from it once we have collected some data about that, so stay tuned for more information very soon. Meanwhile we can conclude that it is very easy and quick to purchase a Hashlet digital cloud miner, it took us just about 30 minutes from the time we started the purchase process, to do the payment using Bitcoins until the moment we’ve had an active ZenCloud account and had the Hashlet to start mining for us. This is among the fastest, if not the fastest, complete process for purchasing cloud mining hashrate and having it start mining for you from all such services that we have tried so far, and we have tried many.
– For more information about the Hashlet Digital Cloud Miner by GAW Miners…
Genesis Mining is a relatively new and interesting Scrypt cloud mining service provider that has apparently been operating for a bit over a month already, so we have decided to give it a try and have been testing it for a few days already. The company behind the service is apparently registered in Bermuda (the address is listed on the website), though interestingly enough the agreement when purchasing hashrate says “This Agreement is governed by German law”. It seems that Genesis Mining has already attended some Bitcoin and crypto currencies related conferences as sponsors or speaker, and the fact that they have been around for a while and that they are actively developing the service makes them seem more trustworthy. Though as usual we advise caution when checking out new services of this type as you may never know for sure, so never invest more than you can afford to lose.
Genesis Mining offers the ability not to mine only Litecoin, but also multiple other Scrypt crypto currencies such as DOGE for example with user control what to be mined. There is an option to be payed in Bitcoins as well, with the service automatically mining the most profitable coins for you and exchanging them for BTC. Also you get to receive your earnings on a daily basis directly sent to your wallet, definitely an advantage over some other alternatives that do have weekly payments for example. Another good thing is that there are no hidden fees to pay such as percentage from your earnings for hardware maintenance or electricity bills, you pay a fixed price for the hashrate you want to rent and it is yours for a period of 1 year.
The standard cloud hashrate plans offered by Genesis Mining are for 2 MHS, 10 MHS and 50 MHS, though there is an option that allows you to set a custom hashrate like for example 1 MHS. For the purposes of our test we have purchased 1 MHS worth of Scrypt hashrate in order to try out the service and report our experience with it. The payment types currently accepted include Euro, USD as well as Litecoin or Bitcoin. 1 MHS of Scrypt hashpower currently costs 0.291 BTC, though when you increase the MHS you can get better price per MHS, so for example 10 MHS will cost you 2.585 BTC and 50 MHS will cost you 11.308 BTC. The page for ordering hashpower has an option to enter a promo code as well, you can use the following up to date promo code to get a 5% discount of the regular price CryptoMiningBlog5. This code does give you a good opportunity to test out the service starting with one or just a few MHS at a better price than the standard one.
After we have purchased our 1 MHS hashrate for testing it took less than an hour for our payment in Bitcoins to be processed and our hashrate to be credited in the account. After you get the purchased hashrate credited into your account you have to setup the way you want your hashrate to work for you. By default it is set to 100% Auto (BTC) mode, so that you will mine various coins and get them sold for BTC and get payments directly in Bitcoins every day. You have a nice and clean interface with dials where you can set in percentages how you wish your hashrate to be distributed and in what crypto currency you want to get paid. You can for example use your hashrate to mine for Litecoin or DOGE along with a few other crypto Scrypt-based currencies such as AUR, FTC, LOT or MEC. Interestingly enough an option to get payment in Darkcoin has also just been added, meaning that what you have mined gets sold for DRK and you get the amount sent to your wallet.
Although this easy to use interface does look very nice it lacks something very important and that is some information about current profitability. This is a must have feature in order to give the users of the service some information on what could be the best option for the moment based on the current exchange rates. At least some approximates would be nice, otherwise people would have to track manually all of these currencies to see what to mine all the time in order to get the maximum profit, or the idea here is just to choose the Automatic BTC option and not care much. An estimate on profitability based on the last 24 hours of mining would be nice to have and very useful, for the purposes of our tests we have decided to start with 100% to get payment in Bitcoins, even though this may not be the most profitable option on the long term. We are also going to try out mining with the other options as well.
The main dashboard also is clean and nicely structured giving you a brief about your current hashrate, last payment in USD as well as the total payments for the last 7 days again shown in USD. Below that you can find a chart with the daily earnings you get each day for roughly the last month. What we are missing here is an option to see the total earnings you have received since you have started using the service, something that is really useful. Another nice feature that we would want to have here is not only earnings calculated in USD, but also in BTC for example to go along the USD estimate. The service does daily payments, though so far it takes more than another half of day to get your daily payment for the previous day and this can use some improvement.
And now a bit more about the return of investment you can expect and the actual profitability of the Genesis Mining cloud mining service according to our tests. For the 1st day (actually less than 12 hours) we have received a payment of 0.45 USD or actually 0.00070292 in BTC. The second day was a bit better with a payment of roughly 0.97 USD or 0.00152639 BTC. The third and fourth days were even better with 1.30 USD or 0.00202339 BTC and 1.25 USD or 0.00197630 BTC. Considering the fact that for our 1 MHS worth of Scrypt hashrate we have paid 0.21387012 BTC by using a discount code and taking into account the earnings from the last two days as a reference we will need about three and a half months to break even. This of course will be true if the current profitability remains the same as it is now, meaning that we are going to have a decent profit for the rest of the contract period that is 12 months in total. Without the discount however and at the current standard price for 1 MHS the break even time will be close to about 5 months of the daily profitability remains the same.
So far our general impressions from the service are positive, even though it still can use some improvements in terms of functionality and a speedup in the time it takes to get your earnings would also be nice. It would also be nice to have some sort of a contact/support section for actual customers, so that you would not have to use the generic contact form on the website in case of a problem or question. We are going to continue using the service for the next year until our contract is over, so you can expect more reports about the service as we are ready to share more of our experience using it. Considering the fact that there are still not many options to go for a Scrypt cloud mining service, this one is definitely worth keeping an eye on.
– For more information and to try out the Genesis Mining Scrypt could mining service yourself…
NiceHash is an interesting and relatively new service that allows users to sell the hashrate that their mining hardware generates or to buy such to mine a specific coin at a user set pool with one of the supported crypto algorithms. This service however is not a mining rig leasing or cloud mining from a centralized service provider, it is more like something in between these two and the result you get is actually pretty nice as an alternative to the other two services. We have tried the service for both selling some hashrate ourselves as well as buying some to see how are thing and to also get a good idea on how well it operates for both buyers and sellers. We are also going to share some useful tips that we have discovered during our testing of the service, so that you might get a better start should you decide to check it out yourself.
The first impression when you open the website of NiceHash can be a bit misleading if you are not sure what to expect, so we do recommend to start with the FAQ section of the website to learn about the service and how it operates in order to get to know how things work. The FAQ section should give you most of the answers you might have, and you should also check the page with information about compatible software miners with the service and make sure you are using one of the recommended miners in order to avoid possible problems. In short what NiceHash does for you is act as a stratum proxy between you and the pool that your hardware is mining at for the moment. So all you have to do is to set the right stratum server for NiceHash in your miner, depending on the algorithm that the miner uses and just run the miner as usual with your Bitcoin address as a username and enter any password. It is as simple as that and you don’t even need to register in order to be able to sell your hashrate, though for buying hashrate you will have to make an account, because you will be depositing Bitcoins that you will use for purchase. Currently NiceHash supports Scrypt, SHA-256, Scrypt-Adaptive-Nfactor and X11 algorithms and you can purchase hahsrate and point it at the pool you want to mine at if you are buying hashrate. All purchases and payments are made in Bitcoins, no other crypto currency is currently supported by the service. So you can say that when selling your hashrate it is almost as if you are mining in a multipool where regardless of what is being mined you get payed in Bitcoins in the end.
Now, we have started with the buying part where we have decided to get some X11 hashrate as DarkCoin is currently booming, so the interest in X11 hashrate is high at the moment. We have started with depositing a small amount of Bitcoins to our wallet address in NiceHash and we quickly got the deposit available as only two confirmations are required for you to be able to use the deposited Bitcoins for orders. Again, in order to be able to buy hashrate you will need to register as the procedure is a bit more complex and can be even a bit confusing the first time you go through the whole process, but after that it is easier as you know what to do and how.
The page where you create an order is the hardest to go through the first time, especially if you haven’t familiarized yourself with the way the service operates and checked how things work with the orders. Here you need to select the algorithm you are going to be purchasing hashrate for, then select how much you are going to pay (you need to have the Bitcoins already deposited and confirmed), the minimum you cans pend for an order is 1 Bitcoin cent (0.01 BTC). You can select to limit the maximum hashrate you are getting per second, something that is a good idea actually, but we’ll get back to that in a moment. And then you also need to set the price you are willing to pay in Bitcoins per Gigahash per Day, you can find the current rates for the different algorithms on the front page. Calculating this can be a bit confusing, and you need to be careful and watch how the market price is moving with the currently available orders. Based on your settings you will get an estimation for the total hashrate you will get and the duration you will have the purchased hashrate mine for you. Do note that the service charges 2% fee on the purchase of mining hashrate.
After that you need to enter the pool details, make sure you are setting the right pool that uses the algorithm you are purchasing hashrate for and also make sure to use pools that are working stable and can handle a lot of hashrate coming to them. If you do not limit the hashrate you are going to be getting and you have the highest price you ma end up throwing an enormously high hashrate at the pool of your choice and thus you may bring it down if it cannot handle the load. This is one of the reasons you need to use some sort of a limit to the hahsrate you are going to be using, regardless of the total amount you purchase. One of the nicest things about NiceHash is that you can purchase 1 GHS worth of X11 hashrate for example and have that mining for you for 10 minutes, 60 minutes, a day or more… it all depends on the total amount you are spending and the limit (if any) you have set. So you can purchase ridiculously high hashrate for short period of time and get it right away instead of purchasing just a few megahashes that will mine for you for months – the end result should be similar. The first option of getting a lot of hashrate for shorter time does have some more advantages however as yo do not have to worry about difficulty increase as much as when mining for longer time, but it also has drawbacks. You must always set limits in the hashrate if you are mining for crypto currencies such as Bitcoin or DarkCoin that do have pretty high difficulty and finding block make take up to 30 minutes, an hour or even more. The reason for that is to have the hashrate mine for you for long as if you get some bad luck and the block finding time is over the average your mining profit may be less if you throw a lot of hashrate for just a few minutes. Spreading the hashrate with a limit for longer time would cover better for bad luck at the pool and will also minimize the risk of you bringing the pool down, so do consider setting the limit for hashing speed.
When you activate an order you can see the progress and you can also edit some of the parameters or cancel the order before it is fully executed and get back the remaining Bitcoins that are still not spent. What you can edit here is the price you are paying for GH per Day, though there is a catch here and it is that you can only increase the price, not get it lower than your initial offer. This is a plus for the people selling hashrate, but not so good for maximizing efficiency for people buying hashrate, though you can cancel the order and recreate it with lower price if suddenly the market price for the hashrate drops significantly under your set price. The other thing you can change on the fly is the limit of the hashrate you have set, or if you haven’t set one you can add it here. Changing both settings may take a bit before they are activated and if you are changing the limit significantly it may also take a bit longer before the active hashrate adjusts to the new value.
You can also track your order in the list of orders on the homepage, your active orders are marked with blue, so they are easy to spot and keep track of. This is the place where you can track the current market price and especially if you do not want to rent all of the available hashrate, but only some part of it there is no need to set the highest price, with a lower offer you can still get the amount of hashrate you need and as we’ve mentioned if the price increases you can also adjust it up or cancel the order and recreate it if the price gets lower. It is a wise idea to keep track of the market in order to really get the maximum for the Bitcoins you pay for renting hashrate and if needed do adjustments to your order. Also do check the expected return of investment based on the price you pay and the hashrate you get and if the market price goes too high then you can cancel your order and wait for the price to drop before reactivating the order as in the end you want to end up with more than you have spent.
In our test we have spent 0.01682019 BTC for renting X11 hashrate at 1.1 BTC per GH per Day and the resulting mined DarkCoins wih the rented hashrate was a little over 1.2 DRK which converted on the DRK/BTC exchange rate was 0.01595322 BTC. We could’ve made a bit more if we have spread our hashrate for longer period of time with a lower limit than and we’ve started without a limit at first, so initially we got about 1 GHS worth of hashrate thrown at the pool and it was able to handle it. Again we advice to use a limit and not set the limit too high, even better start with a small limit and adjust it based on the results you are getting. Once you make a few orders you will get better, so do the first ones with a small amount so that if you mess up the order parameters the loss will be small in the worst case scenario.
Moving on to the renting part, we have decided to test out renting a single GeForce GTX 780 Ti video card that produces about 4.6 MHS for mining X11 crypto coins such as DarkCoin. Do note however that it is not that wise to rent Nvidia GPUs for X11 hashrate as you need to use ccminer and it currently does not support backup pools, so if NiceHash is not providing work for you the card cannot switch to a backup pool and will stay idle and this is something that you do not want. Still this may not happen if you keep selling your hashrate, unless you decide to set a minimum for the price you are going to be selling your hashrate. Normally, unless there are no orders left your hashrate will be sold, though it might not be at the highest market order for the moment – this is something you can keep track in the status page for your account. Since selling of hashrate does not require you to register at NiceHash you need to find your status page by looking for your username which is also the Bitcoic payment address that you have set at the software miner. Do note that the service applies 2% fee for renting hashrate as well as for buying it, you will notice the subtraction of the fee when payment is processed. Also payments are made few times a day if your balance exceeds a certain minimum, different for each algorithm and you can read about them in the FAQ.
In our first 24 hours selling our hashrate of about 4.6 MHS we’ve managed to earn 0.00490318 BTC, so not so bad. Do note that the market price was about 1.1 BTC when we started renting the hashrate and in the next 24 hours with the market price increasing to about 2.6 BTC at the end of the period we have earned 0.0079467 BTC or significantly better than for the first day. In fact if you want to make some good profit it may be wise to sell your X11 hashrate than to directly mine for DarkCoin for example as at the moment the interest is high and in the short term you can get more BTC than directly mining for DRK and exchanging them immediately after that or for using a multipool with direct BTC payout.
Our conclusion, NiceHash is really a good alternative to multipools and cloud mining service providers or mining rig leases and if used right it can give you some nice profit, regardless if you buy hashrate or sell your hashrate. It provides you with a great opportunity to mine a lot of a new coin at launch time if you do not have a lot of hashing power yourself or to maximize the profit from the hashrate you currently own easier than to always look for new coins to throw your hashrate at. There are also some things that can still be improved, for example if you have registered to link your account to the selling hashrate functionality and thus be able to use the generated BTC from selling for buying hashrate as well should you wish to do so. Generally however we’ve had no problems using NiceHash and we like how things are working out already. So if you still haven’t checked out the service we do recommend to do so now.
– To check out the NiceHash service for buying or selling hashing power…