AMD and Nvidia GPU Miners For SpreadCoin Now Available

21 Nov
2014

spreadcoin-nvidia-gpu-miner-hitting-a-block

SpreadCoin (SPR) is not a new coin, but it was a mine-able only with CPU up until yesterday when an AMD GPU miner was released and today the coin also got an Nvidia GPU miner that is apparently much faster than the AMD one. The AMD OpenCL miner is available on the official SpreadCoin GitHub page (source) and there is a compiled windows binary available on the official coin website. You can get the spreadminer for Nvidia GPUs thanks to tsiv who created it (source), there is an official windows binary release for Compute 3.0 to 5.2 GPUs available on his GitHub page as well that you can download and use directly.

SpreadCoin uses SpreadX11 algorithm and does not use mining pools, you can only solo mine the coin, so you need to make sure that you have created spreadcoin.conf file with the required settings to be able to connect the miner to the wallet running on one of your computers. The config file needs to be placed in the Users\ YOURUSERNAME \AppData\Roaming\SpreadCoin folder and named spreadcoin.conf and then you need to restart the wallet, also make sure that you have downloaded the block information before trying to run a miner. You can find an example settings for the config file below if you haven’t solo mined yet and this will be the first coin that you try and don’t forget to set the username and password in the miner config to be the same and also allow any additional IP addresses or a range that will be connecting to the wallet:

rpcuser=username
rpcpassword=password
rpcallowip=127.0.0.1
rpcallowip=192.168.0.*
rpcport=41677
port=41678
gen=0
server=1

For the moment you would probably want to try out the coin if you have an Nvidia GPUs as they are performing much better in terms of hashrate than what you can get on AMD GPUs. On a stock Radeon R9 280X we managed to get just about 800 KHS using the official OpenCL miner and with the Nvidia CUDA miner on a GTX 750 Ti card we easily got over 1400 KHS, trying it out on a GTX 980 we’ve managed to squeeze close to 4500 KHS. So if you have some Nvidia GPUs, especially Maxwell-based cards you might want to mine some SpreadCoins while the difficulty is not way too high to be worth mining with one or just a few cards. Also do not forget that with solo mining luck plays an important role as well and you might get lucky and find more blocks in short time or not and wait more for little blocks, so give the miners some time.

– For more information about SpreadCoin check the official announcement thread on Bitcointalk…

Badbitcoin, a List of Bitcoin Websites to Avoid

21 Nov
2014

the-bitcoin-badlist

One of the biggest issues with Bitcoin-related and crypto currency oriented websites is with the trust, especially when talking about companies offering a product or service that you need to pay for with either cash or crypto coins. Companies claiming to make mining hardware, or selling such as well as cloud mining and investment services all try to attract customers, but among legitimate ones there are also many scams that are there just to get your money or coins and run away with them. It is hard to keep track of all of them and know which ones are legitimate and which ones are scams, especially with so many new sites appearing every day. Sometimes it is no even uncommon for some legitimate at first company to turn bad and ruin the good image they may have initially created and disappointing a lot of customers by not delivering on what they have promised. The general rule of thumb is to be careful and if something looks too good to be true, then it is most likely so and you should stay away from it, regardless if it is a promise for very high return of investment, very promising mining hardware or very competitively priced cloud mining service. Sometimes there are exclusions from that rule, but they are not very common, so you better be safe than sorry…

Fortunately there are places where you can find lists of companies that have proven to be scams or at least that are very likely to be such, based on reports from users that have tried them out or have done some research. Websites such as Badbitcoin for example offer you a quick and easy way to check if a new crypto currency website that you just found out about is legit or might be a scam. If you see the website in question listed as one to avoid or with high chance that it might be a scam, then you better avoid it just to be on the safe side. We have said that sometimes there are websites that may seem like a scam, mostly due to the operators willing to remain anonymous, but then turn out to be safe and deliver on what they are promising… these however are rare to find. There are also examples of the opposite as well – an open and honest-looking service that operates and delivers on their normal and not exaggerated promises for months suddenly turns out to be a scam, but these are also rare. Based on our own experience many of the scam sites are just going for a quick run of few weeks trying to mislead as many people as they can for a short period of time and then disappear with their money, though some scams do continue for months. This is precisely why it is a wise idea to do some research when money are involved and websites such as Badbitcoin and the lists of websites to avoid that they provide can be a useful part of your research.

– Visit the wbesite Badbitcoin for more information on which websites to avoid as possible scams…

Trying Out the Hashie Bitcoin Cloud Mining Service

20 Nov
2014

hashie-bitcoin-cloud-mining

Hashie is a new Bitcoin cloud mining service that we’ve been keeping an eye on, it has been available for a bit over a month already, so we’ve decided that it is time to give it a try. The website is registered on October 9th and apparently the service operators want to operate the service anonymously and keep a low profile, like many other similar services, though this does rise some concern among users that are considering to invest in such a service. This is precisely why we gave some time before actually trying out the service ourselves. The main page of the service is pretty basic and does not give a lot of information about the service, you need to register in order to properly check it out and see all the features available to you. What we like is that the service operators seem pretty active in developing the service and have been adding new features all the time, though some of them do need a bit more work to be really good and optimally useful for the miners. We’ll be talking about these in a bit as well as covering what else is needed to make the service better based on our experience and opinion, but so far what we are seeing is very promising.

amhash-hashrate-current-price

Up until today the service offered their Generation 1 miners for customers at a price of $4.90 USD per 10 GHS with $0.002 USD per GHS daily maintenance fee with some additional price discounts for volume purchases that can bring down the price per 10 GHS down to $4.51 USD. Today the service however announced their partnership with the AMHash mining farm that is apparently operated by ASICMiner and RockMiner and has started offering cloud mining contracts from that service provider. The old Generation 1 contracts are still available, however the new AMhash ones are are priced lower at 0.0012 BTC per GHS and have a lower daily maintenance fee of $0.00163 USD per GHS. Both contracts are unlimited and continue until the mined coins are more than what you need to pay for maintenance fees with instant activation. The Hashie service also offers 10 GHS free miner for everyone that registers to test the service, however until you purchase some cloud mining hashrate you are not able to withdraw any of the mined coins from the free miner. The minimum purchase you can go for is 20 GH and the payments are made with BTC, in order to purchase hashrate you need to send the coins you your account’s wallet – only 3 confirmations are required before you can spend the BTC for hashrate.

hashie-market-offers

The service has a market where you can put for sale your hashrate if you want to sell it to get cash faster, there are already some offers available, however there is a bit of a problem with the market at the moment. You are not able to purchase just a part of the hashrate put on sale by a user of the service, you need to buy it all, so this makes it harder to actually use this feature. Also the new AMhash cloud hashrate is not yet trade-able on the Market, only the Generation 1 is. The good thing about the market is that you might be able to get a better price per GHS, especially when purchasing bigger amounts of hashrate. Again, buying on the Market requires you to already have the needed amount of Bitcoins available in your account’s wallet and you can of course not only buy, but also sell your purchased hashrate should you decide so. You also have the option to Rename, Merge and Split your miners as every purchase you make becomes a separate miner instance and you can also use the Auto-rebuy functionality to automatically reinvest some of the earnings in more hashrate.

hashie-interface-my-miners

The service has daily payouts, but they are not automatically sent to your Bitcoin wallet, just credited to your service account and you can withdraw them after that if they meet the minimums set. The minimum withdraw amount is 0.0012 BTC and there is a 0.0002 BTC fee that will be subtracted from the amount you decide to withdraw to your Bitcoin wallet. The thing that is not so nice is that you actually don’t know how much you will earn on a daily basis, there is no estimation provided by the service, you need to wait for the daily payout to be executed to see how much you have earned for the previous day. This means that you do not get earnings credited when a block is solved, this happens once every 24 hours automatically and you need to check the Transactions log after that to see how much you have mined with your hashrate available. The good thing is that there is a detailed information in the transaction log on how much was actually mined and what were the electricity fees you have paid etc., so it is quite useful and detailed. It would’ve been nice to also get a statistics for things like mined this week or month, since the start etc. to make it easier to keep a track of your ROI as this is important for miners.

So far we like what we are seeing as functionality of the service and it seems to work pretty well, though the functionality does need some more improvements to make it even better it does seem like a cloud mining service to keep an eye on. We are going to continue testing it and reporting our experience as time goes by, but so far things are looking promising and the price per GHS and the maintenance fees does seem to be one of the best currently available, especially with the new AMhash contracts just introduced. If you just want to check the service out you can register and claim your free 10 GHS miner, it is quick and completely free to do it and then decide if you should invest in more hashrate. We started like that, then bought some Generation 1 hashrate and now we are also going to be purchasing some AMhash cloud mining hashrate as well to see how it goes. As usual when considering to invest in cloud mining services do not put all of your investment in just one place and never spend more than you can afford to loose.

– For more information and to try out the Hashie Bitcoin cloud mining service with 10 GHS free…

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