Genesis Mining, What is More Profitable to Mine – BTC, DASH or ETH

1 Feb
2016

genesis-mining-hashrate-prices

If we have to point our favorite cloud mining company in terms of reliability and trust, then it is definitely going to be Genesis Mining. Apart from providing good and stable services, this is the only cloud mining company that provides users with the ability to purchase Bitcoin (SHA256) cloud mining hashrate provided by ASICs as well as DASH (X11) and Ethereum (ETH) hashrate powered by GPUs. Unfortunately the earlier adopters might not be way too happy if they have purchased hashrate with higher maintenance fee as with the recent rapid increase in the total Bitcoin network hashrate and the high exchange rate per BTC the profit might not be that great. Currently the service sells Bitcoin cloud mining hashrate with $0.00069 USD per GHS per day as a maintenance fee, but some months ago it was $0.0012 USD per GHS and prior to that $0.0015 USD and even before that $0.002 USD. It is important to note that the maintenance fee is set at the time you purchase hashrate based on the currently set feed (depending on the generation of mining hardware being used). This means that if you have purchased 1 THS Bitcoin cloud mining hashrate 1 year ago, then now it would be earning you less than if you purchase 1 THS hashrate at the moment. Of course you would have mined for 1 year with that 1 THS, but then again you would have been mining for 1 year already with that previously purchased hashrate at a much lower difficulty.

Unlike with Bitcoin cloud mining contracts that are Unlimited (mining for you until they are profitable) With X11 and Ethereum cloud mining hashrate you are getting 1 year term contracts with no extra maintenance fee, everything is included in the price you pay for the hashrate. The question that arises here is what kind of cloud mining hashrate is more profitable to invest into now from the three different ones available if you consider they will be operational for 1 year if you have a set amount of USD to invest. Let us say we have $1050-1060 USD available to invest and they will get us 2.5 THS worth of Bitcoin hashrate, around 59 MHS Ethereum hashrate or 50 MHS X11 hashrate. So at what profits are we looking at after 1 year in terms of BTC (using current DASH and ETH exchange rates to BTC)?

We know that Bitcoin will have its second reward halving around the middle of the year and with the recent months we have seen a very steep increase in the network difficulty. So if we estimate that the total hashrate will at least double in the next year and the reward will drop in half in six months we can roughly estimate to expect to mine about 2.2 BTC (without taking the fees out of the equation) which is less than what we’d have to invest at the current BTC to USD exchange rate… however with Bitcoin reward halving and a significant increase in the difficulty we should also see an increase in the price of BTC.

Moving to Ethereum, a hashrate of 59 MHS with an expectation that total network difficulty will be double in a year should result in about 3.75 BTC equivalent if the ETH/BTC exchange rate remains the same as it is now. This at the current exchange rate of BTC to USD is more than we would have to pay for the hashrate, but then again we expect that in a year time Ethereum will be worth more than it is now just like BTC should be and the USD value should be higher. There are some concerns that Ethereum might switch from PoW to PoS in less than 1 year, in such case the hashrate you purchase will be switched to X11 hashrate.

What about the X11 cloud mining hashrate, what we should expect from the DASH mining with 50 MHS hashrate? This seems to provide the worst scenario at the moment with an estimate of just about 155 DASH coins mined in a year or about 1.78 BTC if the current exchange rate remains the same. With DASH (previously know as DarkCoin) things are more steady so it might be easier to do a more accurate longer term prediction.

In the end however it might be more profitable to just buy Bitcoin at the current price and sell it in a year than to purchase Bitcoin cloud mining hashrate or X11 cloud mining hashrate, with Ethereum cloud mining however you are most likely going to realize some good profit, but don’t forget that we have done just some rough estimates and in 1 year time things might look completely different. So be careful and think twice before making a decision should you invest in cloud mining hashrate, what type of hashrate to invest into or should you just buy some Bitcoins and wait for them to become even more expensive than they already are.

– You can get more information about the different Cloud Mining Contracts by Genesis Mining here…

Checking Out Burst, the HDD Mined Cryptocurrency

31 Jan
2016

burst-local-wallet-windows-client

It has been over a year and a half since we’ve initially checked the Burst altcoin that you mine with a hard drive, so we’ve decided to revisit what has happened since. The Burst crypto currency uses a new algorithm for proof of HDD capacity (POC) mining, so it needs a lot of hard drive space – the more, the better and more coins you should be able to mine. One of the reasons that we wanted to check the coin out again was the availability of a Windows Wallet Client that is supposed to integrate everything in a single user friendly package that is easy even for novice miners to get started. So we have started fro the beginning downloading everything we need, generating a new wallet address, plotting 100GB for mining and trying out the CPU and GPU assisted mining software…

Unfortunately we’ve had some trouble along the way, like the lack of a default Java-based wallet config file for the local Burst wallet (apparently not included in the client package version 0.2) that was resulting in a weird error from the Java when trying to run the local wallet (we have Java installed and working properly, but the wallet is crashing with unexpected error because the config file is simply missing in the official zipped release of the GUI wallet, so it took us some time to figure out the cause of the error). Downloading the complete Burst blockchain can take a while as it is getting close to 2.5 GB already, though you can make it faster by downloading a zipped version and adding it to the local wallet. Generating plot files on the hard drives is also a process that takes quite some time, even for a relatively small 100 GB size it could take a while, let alone for large terabyte plots. We’ve also had trouble getting the GPU assisted miner working, though the CPU one apparently works just fine. You should try mining on a pool as solo mining is probably pretty pointless with such a high difficulty, but even on a pool with a small plot size it might not be worth the effort to start mining at all, so go for it only if you have a lot of free HDD space in the range of Terabytes, not Gigabytes.

In the end, if you still haven’t gotten into Burst, then it most likely it is late to do so now. There is an improvement since we’ve last tried it, however we don’t think it is enough, especially on the user friendliness front and that is an important thing if you want to attract more new users and miners especially. Still, if you have some significant amount of free HDD space and what to try mining a crypto currency that does not require much of a CPU or GPU resources, then you can check Burst out. Another alternative for making money out of your free HDD space could be Storj’s DriveShare when it launches officially, hopefully later this year, so if you are in for the profit you might skip that one as well. For now we are probably going to stick for a while longer testing the DriverShare beta, but more out of curiosity as it is not very profitable and requires a significant initial investment in order to be eligible for rewards, instead of trying to mine Burst coins. Some good places to trade Burst include Bittrex, Stex and Livecoin.

– For more information about the Burst crypto currency with Proof of Capacity HDD mining…

New and Improved Ethereum Wallet 0.3.9 (Beta 6) Released

30 Jan
2016

ethereum-wallet-latest-beta-shapeshift

The official Ethereum graphical wallet is improving and getting more user friendly with each new beta release, making it easier for people that are not very happy with the console only clients such as geth and eth. The wallet relies on geth (by default) or eth as a backend and provides a user friendly interface with the most important information and functions available to the user without requiring him to type console commands to execute them. The latest Beta 6 release makes it easier to backup your wallet by adding a menu command that takes you directly tot he folder where your wallet is being stored, so the only thing you need to do is to copy the file in a safe location. The new wallet comes with a button called Deposit using Bitcoin that invokes integrated support for ShapeShift allowing you to easily and quickly buy Ether coins and have them easily transferred to your Ethereum wallet. Although the button is called Deposit with Bitcoin you can actually use other altcoins supported by ShapeShift to purchase Ethereum with the needed support built-in right into the wallet. Another useful new addition is that the wallet will now show historical prices from the time of the transaction thanks to integration with the CryptoCompare service, so you will know what was the exact fiat value of the Ethereum transaction at the moment you have made it.

– To download an try out the latest official Ethereum GUI Wallet 0.3.9 (Beta 6)…

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