Storj DriveShare Rewards Report for January

5 Feb
2016

driveshare-stats

Last month we have decided to give out a try of the latest Storj DriveShare GUI and to participate in the beta testing of the service. We also wanted to check out the rewards that people are getting in return for their help in testing out the network and today Storj will be distributing the next bath of rewards. We have participated in the test for about 20 days with 100 GB of space shared on the network and according to the data published our reward for helping test the network in January is a little over 12 SJCX coins with about 94% uptime for the time duration. With the current StorjCoinX exchange rate this is about 115000 satoshi or about $0.45 USD, it may not seem that much, but do not forget that these are rewards for beta testing the service. Sharing more space for longer time with better uptime should bring you more rewards, though this should give you an idea on what to expect should you decide to help with beta testing. What you should know is that helping with beta testing won’t be that much profitable, but once the service officially launches what you get back in return for sharing your free hard drive space should be more rewarding.

For the moment however the users beta testing are required to purchase at least 10000 SJCX in order to be eligible for rewards and the rewards themselves are not that big unless you share a lot of space. The people sharing 25 TB of space each for the service are apparently getting about 1500 SJCX coins as a reward. So getting into the beta testing phase and participating in the reward program is more for people that do believe in the service and as a kind of a long term investment as well. You can of course participate in the testing of the service without having 10000 SJCX in your wallet, however this way you will not be eligible for receiving rewards for your help and support. So if you are interested in checking the service out you can head on to the official DriveShare website and download the GUI version of the software.

The number of unique participants in the beta testing of the DriveShare software in January is 533 that are eligible for rewards according to the official published rewards list. The list also includes 1222 more users that do not have 10000 SJCX coins in their wallet, meaning that they are participating without receiving rewards. As a comparison in December last year there were 420 unique wallets participating with at least 10000 SJCX and receiving rewards and 711 more that were not eligible for rewards. For November the numbers were 352 and 663 respectively, for October there were 342 and 393, so there are more users joining and helping test the service. Last week the service has announced the reach of another milestone in their testing phase, passing 2 PB of total storage shared and now it is already over 3 PB of storage shared.

– Visit the official DriveShare website for more details about the beta of the service…

OXBTC Cryptocurrency Investment Platform Has Been Launched

5 Feb
2016

oxbtc-platform
A new cryptocurrency investment platform has been launched called OXBTC that combines Bitcoin and Litecoin cloud mining with Bitcoin and Litecoin deposits with interest. What the service essentially combines is the ZeusHash cloud mining platform with the HalleyBTC Bitcoin savings investment platform and is apparently operated by the same people behind these two other services. OXBTC extends a bit the basic functionality offered by the other two platforms and combines them into a single one to make it easy for users, or this should be the idea, but it could as easy be considered as a rebranding just to attract new customers. The claims that they are making about the “World’s Highest ROI” on their homepage are probably a bit far fetched, especially with the cloud mining with the not so low prices and the recent serious jump in the difficulty of the Bitcoin network especially, so the part with the deposits with interest might be more attractive option.

oxbtc-investment-options
The extra advantage available here is that you can have both deposits in BTC and in LTC and you have two options – 0.02% daily interest rate on deposits or 30-day fixed deposit with 15% Expected APY, available for both Bitcoin and Litecoin. The difference from HalleyBTC is the availability of Litecoin deposits here, however the 90-day Fixed deposit with 17% Expected APY is not available at OXBTC.

The other option you have is to invest in cloud mining hashrate and you again have the option to purchase both SHA256 hashrate for mining Bitcoin as well as Scrypt hashrate for mining Litecoin, just like on ZeusHash, however here you should also have the ability to trade the hashrate you have purchased. The market for trading BTC and LTC cloud mining hashrate however is still not operational apparently as the service has just launched, so it will most likely become active shortly. The regular price for cloud mining hashrate is 0.499 USD per GHS for Bitcoin hashrate (Maintenance Fee: $0.0009 / GHS / Day) and 13 USD per MHS for Litecoin hashrate (Maintenance Fee: $0.02 / MHS / Day). The prices here are a bit higher than they were at ZeusMiner, but the maintenance fee is a bit lower and OXBTC also offers Scrypt hashrate that is no longer available for quite some time at ZeusMiner.

The new platform might seem quite interesting to check out, however we would advice caution with it, because it is apparently being operated by the same people behind ZeusMiner and ZeusHash and we have seen some negative things from them, There are investment services to help with just about every type of investing. Motley Fool has an options trading service, Jim Cramer offers stock alerts, and so on. For example there were numerous issues with their cloud mining platform and even at the moment ZeusMiner is not fully functional, wallets are not working and you cannot withdraw any balances and mining does not seem to be working. Their other platform HalleyBTC does seem to be working fine for the moment, but we would still advice caution – better be safe than sorry. Still, more out of curiosity, we are going to be checking the crypto prognose to see what they have made this time.

– To check out the new OXBTC deposits with interest and cloud mining platform…

Decred (DCR), a New Hybrid PoW/PoS Altcoin Launching Soon

5 Feb
2016

cgminer-decred-dcr

Decred (DCR) is a new open, progressive, and self-funding crypto currency with a system of community-based governance integrated into its blockchain. At its core is a hybridized proof-of-work proof-of-stake (PoW/PoS) consensus system that aims to strike a balance between PoW miners and PoS voters to create a more robust notion of consensus. The project is a result of the theoretical proposals brought by proof-of-activity (PoA) and MC2 in 2013. Decred development started in April, 2014 with a single developer and expanded to include developers from btcsuite shortly thereafter.

Decred is currently running on testnet preparing for the launch of the mainnet on 12:00 PM CST February 8th, 2016. There crypto currency uses Blake256 14-rounds algorithm for mining and there is a cgminer fork (source) already available for testing, though currently only getwork is supported and not stratum. The cgminer for Decred GPU mining is available below compiled for 64-bit Windows ready for testing on some of the few currently available mining pools that also run on the testnet (will be switching to mainnet after the official launch). The cgminer works on both AMD and Nvidia GPUs as the currently available ccMiner forks from tpruvot and sp do not currently work with Decred even though they do have support for Blake256 14-rounds mining.

Trying out the cgminer for Decred (DRC) on an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 has shown an average hashrate of about 1.3 GHS and trying the miner on an AMD Radeon R9 280X has shown a hashrate of about 1.3 GHs as well with both runningn at stock frequencies. There is already quite a lot of interest and a large community forming around the Decred crypto currency even before the official launch, so this is something that is worth checking out if you still have not heard about it. Also make sure you get ready for the official launch of the coin on Monday. Some good places to trade Decred (DCR) include Bittrex, Binance and Livecoin.

– Download and try the cgminer fork for mining Decred on Windows (64-bit miner)…

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