The cloud mining provider Geneis Mining has started offering Ethereum cloud mining contracts again after they were not available for a couple of months with the focus more on ZCash cloud mining with GPUs. The new mining contracts are available at a lower price and with an extended 2 Years period with no additional mining fees (everything is included in the price you pay for the hashrate). There is of course a clause in the contract saying that in case Ethereum switches to Proof of Stake (POS) before the contract period ends your hashrate will not disappear, but will instead be switched to the most profitable algorithm to mine at that point of time. Initially we expected to see Ethereum (ETH) switch to POS at some point this year, but this will most likely be delayed and no official date for the switch has been announced yet… and the interest and price of Ethereum has been going up lately once more.

You can currently get 1 MHS Ethereum cloud mining hashrate for $29.99 USD, 30 MHS for $869 USD of 100 MHS for $2799 USD as a preset packages or any custom hashrate in between with discounts for the more you purchase. The Ethereum cloud mining contracts are with a duration of 2 years and there is no maintenance fee, everything is included in the price you pay for the hashrate. You can also use our special discount code CryptoMiningBlog5 to get some extra discount and get even better price should you decide to purchase an Ethereum cloud mining contract from the company.

For more information about the Ethereum cloud mining offers available from Genesis Mining…

The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is the latest addition in Nvidia’s lineup of high-end gaming GPUs, but here we are more interested in another aspect for using these video cards – crypto mining. Tomorrow, March 10th, the sales of the new Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti should start priced at $699 USD, though initially there will be only Founders Edition models only with availability of non-reference designs expected to start showing for sale in April. The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is based on GDDR5X memory clocked at 11 GHz, so the memory timings might not be the best for memory-based crypto algorithms, but the serious number of CUDA cores is there to compensate in terms of performance. Do note that the TDP of the new cards is set at 250W, though we expect that you should be able to lower the Power Limit a bit and get a better results than at stock settings.

Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Specifications:
– Graphics Processing Clusters: 6
– Streaming Multiprocessors: 28
– CUDA Cores (single precision): 3584
– Texture Units: 224
– ROP Units: 88
– Base Clock: 1480 MHz
– Boost Clock: 1582 MHz
– Memory Clock: 5505 MHz
– Memory Data Rate: 11 Gbps
– L2 Cache Size: 2816K
– Total Video Memory: 11264MB GDDR5X
– Memory Interface: 352-bit
– Total Memory Bandwidth: 484 GB/s
– Texture Rate (Bilinear): 331.5 GigaTexels/sec
– Fabrication Process: 16 nm
– Transistor Count: 12 Billion
– Connectors: 3 x DisplayPort, 1 x HDMI
– Form Factor: Dual Slot
– Power Connectors: One 6-pin, One 8-pin
– Recommended Power Supply: 600 Watts
– Thermal Design Power (TDP): 250 Watts
– Thermal Threshold: 91° C

We have managed to do some quick testing of the new GTX 1080 Ti and the results do seem promising. Starting with the currently more profitable algorithms on NiceHash and benchmarking with their NiceHash Miner that uses various fast performing miners (the miner used is noted after the algorithm). Not all of the latest and highest performing miners may be included, so we also ran some additional tests using the Claymore ETH miner that managed to provide a stable hashrate of about 31.8 MHS with stock settings of the card as well as the latest EWBF CUDA miner that managed to squeeze a bit more at about 625 H/s from the GTX 1080 Ti.

You can use these numbers as a reference, including the expected daily profitability if selling the hashrate form a GTX 1080 Ti on NiceHash that their miner also reports. Hopefully we are going to be able to run some more benchmarks in the next couple of days and play around to see what the GPU is capable in terms of overclocking, though with the pretty high boost frequency and a TDP of 250W you should not be expecting a lot more at least from the Founders Edition version that is launching first. Do note that properly powering and cooling six of these GPUs in a mining rig is not going to be as easy as with GTX 1070 Founders Edition for example that consume much less power and are a much more popular choice by miners using Nvidia GPUs.

Do note that with the launch of the GTX 1080 Ti, Nvidia is also going to have a new pricing for the GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition and GeForce GTX 1080 partner boards that will get a bit more cheaper. There is no word on reducing the prices of the GTX 1070 as well however. Furthermore two new models with higher clocked video memory should be available soon, the GeForce GTX 1080 with 11 Gbps along with the already available 10 Gbps model as well as GeForce GTX 1060 9 Gbps along the already available 8 Gbps versions. The faster memory variants might be of interest especially for the miners that are into mining crypto currencies based on algorithms that are more memory dependent such as ZEC or ETH for example.

While the controversy surrounding Bitcoin and the block size debate among others continues with the number of transactions ranking up, filling the 1MB blocks completely and transaction fees rising we just got a new Bitcoin Core 0.14.0 release. The key aspects of the new releases are focused on improving performance for initial block download if you are starting a new full blockchain download as well as faster new block validation and relay. This is a welcome improvement that can be really useful for users with the Bitcoin blockchain data already close to 115GB in size…

Another new feature available in the 0.14.0 release is the optional fee bumping (not enabled by default) that allows users to users to increase the fee their transactions pay even after they’ve broadcast an earlier version of the transaction. This new option might be useful with the increasing number of transactions to help you move some coins at a faster speed if your initial fee was too little. This however is not a real solution for the problem with the blocks getting filled with transactions… we actually need a solution that will help keep transaction fees at a reasonable low level with the Bitcoin price still going up and that will help transactions confirm reasonably quick even with lower fees.

For more details about the newly released Bitcoin Core 0.14.0…

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