BitMain AntMiner U3 Available Again, Comes With New Design

16 Jan
2015

bitmain-antminer-u3-new-design

BitMain has started selling the AntMiner U3 Bitcoin ASIC miner again with a slightly different design than the original first batch, other than that the specifications remain pretty much the same (with some minor differences in cited power usage). The new AntMiner U3 Batch 2 is available with a minimum order quantity of 20 units at a price of 38 USD (0.185 BTC) and the Batch 3 is with a minimum order quantity of just 5 units available at a price of 39 USD (0.19 BTC). The BitMain AntMiner U3 ASIC miners provide 63 GHS at about 60W with 1 Watt per GHS in the new specifications that are published by BitMain with a low noise level.

BitMain AntMiner U3 Specifications:
– Max Hash Rate: 63 GH/s ±5%
– Power Efficiency: 1Watt/GH/s on wall at 0.83V
– Voltage: DC 12V input, 6A
– Chip Quantity per unit: 4
– One 80mm fan
– Noise: ~25 DB at 25 °C ambient temperature
– Hashrate and VDD core voltage can be adjusted via cgminer command line
– USB connection
– 12V AC/DC power brick of 6A, but power line not included
– Certificate Compliance: FCC/CE

BitMain has these miners available for home users that want to have access to affordable priced and silent Bitcoin ASIC miners that want to play with them just for hobby, they are not designed to ROI due to their lower hashrate and not so great power efficiency. Since they are running batch 2 and 3 this means that there is interest in these little devices from users, though you probably would want to get a single unit to play with it and not buy a minimum of 5 or 20 units. This means that most end users will probably not be interested in directly buying AntMiner U3 from BitMain, but will look for some company reselling these at a single piece quantities.

Guarany (GUA) Scrypt -based alternative cryptocoin

15 Jan
2015

guarany-logo

Guarany (GUA) is a digital currency created by Brazilians and released in November 2014. It has as one of its proposals be an educational tool so that more people can understand and adopt Bitcoin. Like every rookie currency Guarany is facing numerous challenges and chief among them is to point the way toward the adoption and use of digital currencies in Brazil, in the main, the Bitcoin.

With elegant design, a Brazilian culture and aggregate being more affordable than the Bitcoin due to its value, the Guarany facilitate entry laymen, and even experts cryptocurrencies. The mission of Guarany community is to attract people’s attention to Bitcoin, teaching them and educating them, using as a basis a friendly and intuitive interface Guarany and all peripheral resources that will be part of the universe of coin and also look for establishments business to adopt the Guarany. The success of Guarany is directly linked to engagement and adoption by the people.

Website:
– http://www.guarany.co/

Block Explorer:
– http://blockexplorer.guarany.co:8080/

Coin Specifications

  • Scrypt PoW/PoS Algorithm
  • Maximum Coins: 10,000,000 GUA
  • Difficulty Retarget: Every 1 block
  • PoW Period: 990000 Blocks ~4,7 Years
  • PoS Min: 8 Hours, PoS Max: 7 Days
  • PoS Interest: 1.0% Annually
  • Premine: 1% Premine used in swap
  • ​Confirmations: 4, Maturity: 150
  • Block Halving: Never

Wallet:
– Windows
– Linux
– Mac OS

Source Code:
– at GitHub

Ports:
– RPC Port: 8744
– P2P Port: 8745

Mining Pools:
– https://aikapool.com/gua/
– https://gua.suprnova.cc/
– http://gua.lifeforce.info/

Coin Exchanges:
– Bleutrade

ZeusHash May Stop Offering Cloud Mining Services

15 Jan
2015

zeushash-bitcoin-cloud-mining-warning

Earlier this month Zeushash has stopped all Scrypt cloud mining contracts due to the maintenance fees exceeding the mined coins for a long period of time. Today the service has warned its user that the same can happen with their Bitcoin cloud mining contracts as well. This is a direct result from the low Bitcoin price that was observed lately along with the relatively high maintenance fees of the service. As per the contract terms the Bitcoin cloud mining contracts can be stopped if the fees are higher than the profit for a period of 10 days. If this happens, though not seeming that likely today as the Bitcoin price has been recovering a bit, it would essentially mean that the ZeusHash platform will not be offering anything to the tens of thousand customers it claims to have. ZeusHash still sells GHS cloud mining hashrate, though they are warning users not to purchase any hashrate for the moment. If they stop offering Bitcoin cloud mining after they stopped with Scrypt, then this would essentially mean that the service will have nothing to offer to its customers.

At the moment it seems that other cloud mining services may start having trouble with the profitability, so they either need to optimize their operations or there is a chance they may get out of business. Most of the cloud mining services offering “Lifetime” cloud mining contracts do come with a term that if the maintenance fees exceed the profit made from the mined coins these contracts can be terminated. So as a result the user interest in cloud mining services has decreased quite a bit lately, the same goes for the purchase of ASIC mining hardware and even building GPU mining farms. There is however a chance that this not so favorable situation at the moment may actually end up helping the whole crypto currency ecosystem by helping normalize things after the very rapid growth that we have observed in the past year… we’ll have to wait and see.

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