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Earlier this month when KNCMiner has announced their KNC Cloud mining plans the prices they asked were way too high to even consider investing in them as they offered no chance of ROI in the 6 months contract periods. Now, apparently after KNC has seen no user interest in their services they started offering a new and only one more reasonably priced Bitcoin cloud mining plan that may seem more attractive to users. The new Bitcoin cloud mining from KNC Cloud is for 400 GHS available for $249 USD with contract duration of 6 months, much better than the initial plan that offered 1 THS for $1995 USD again for 6 months.
So it seems that the new prices are about $0.6225 per GHS for 6 months and the old one was $1.995 USD or we are essentially seeing a more than three times lower price per GHS at the moment. Do note that these prices are for 6 month contracts, not for a year, so the yearly price would be double these numbers, and at this price you could actually consider to invest in some cloud mining hashrate at KNC. There are also no additional maintenance or electricity fees that you need to pay according to KNC. Running the numbers through a mining profit calculator shows that even at the current lower Bitcoin price you should be able to get a return of your investment in less than 6 months if the BTC price remains the same and the network dificulty does not increase with more than 10% each step in these 6 months.
We actually wanted to to try out the KNC Cloud service by purchasing a cloud mining contract at the new price, however we could not finish the purchase procedure for the cloud mining hashrate probably due to a problem in the KNC system that is apparently not properly configured to work with cloud mining hashrate yet. We could not get past the shipping method page even though shipping is not required for the cloud mining hashrate, no matter what we have tried (USA, UK even Sweden address and others) we ended up with a red message saying: “No shipping method available for this combination of products and shipping country“. So what we can say is do not bother with KNC Cloud as you probably will end up with the same error message trying to purchase cloud mining hashrate from them as apparently they are not willing to sell any to anyone. According to KNC “This offer is only available in select territories”, but which territories are actually supported and how that does even matter when you are selling cloud mining service and not a physical hardware?!
- Published in: Cloud Mining
- Related tags: bitcoin cloud mining, cloud mining, KnC, KNC Cloud, KNC cloud mining, KnCMiner
The news agency Reuters has just reported that a U.S. court has shut down Butterfly Labs, a Missouri company, which the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleges for deceptively marketing Bitcoin mining hardware.
“The FTC’s complaint against Butterfly and its corporate officers alleges that the company charged consumers thousands of dollars for its bitcoin computers, called BitForce, but then failed to provide the computers until they were almost obsolete, or in many cases did not provide the computers at all.”
“Butterfly sold its computers from $149 to $29,899 based on the machines’ purported computing power. The FTC said that more than 20,000 consumers had not received the computers they purchases as of September 2013.”
At the time of writing this the Butterfly Labs’ website is still online and there is nothing official coming from the company as a response to the court ruling. We can’t say that we are surprised from this development as Butterfly Labs as one of the first makers of Bitcoin ASIC miners probably was not ready for the overwhelming user demand and a for months and years they literally failed to gt a hold of what was going on with the Bitcoin market and continued to take pre-orders of hardware that they were apparently not capable of delivering. We’ll see if other crypto currently mining hardware companies would suffer the same fate.
– To read the complete Reuters report on the court ruling for the company Butterfly Labs…
- Published in: Crypto News
- Related tags: BFL, Bitcoin ASIC miners, Bitcoin mining, Butterfly Labs, FTC
Nvidia has just introduced their new high-end Maxwell-based GPUs the GTX 980 and GTX 970 and the expectations from them in terms of performance for crypto mining are pretty high. After earlier this year we saw what the mid-range GTX 750 Ti, the first Maxwell card was capable of, we already had high hopes for the upcoming faster models. Apparently we are not going to be disappointed by the performance we are going to get, below you can see a chart with the hashrate that the new GeForce GTX 980 (GM204) provides in various crypto algorithms. These were actual tests ran using the latest versions of CudaMiner and ccMiner with support for Compute 5.0 with no special optimizations that could possibly benefit the new cards any further.
In the table you can see the algorithm, the hashrate you get with the GTX 980 and the TDP usage percentage. The GeForce GTX 980 has a TDP rating of just 165 Watts, so with this maximum power consumption you can see that not all algorithms are utilizing it at 100%, meaning the actual power usage is lower. The performance you can expect to get from the GTX 980 is roughly about three times higher with about three times more power usage as compared to the GTX 750 for crypto mining. The initial price of the GTX 980 however could be a reason for miners to go to the slightly slower GTX 970 model for crypto mining as you should be able to get two GTX 970s for a price a bit higher than for a single GTX 980 and the performance you will get from the two cards should be significantly better than from a single GTX 980.
The results posted above are with a reference GTX 980 card running at stock frequency, considering that the GM204 does overclock really good, higher results can be attained when the card is overclocked. The second set of results (the OC ones) are achieved with the card overclocked to GPU at 1520 MHz, Video RAM to 8250 MHz and TDP limiter set to the maximum 125%. This is really pushing the GTX 980 to its stable maximum limits as the card really does handle serious overclock pretty well. Unfortunately we do not have access to a GTX 970 GPU for the moment, so we cannot yet test to see the difference in performance, though it should not be that high, but the 970 should be available at a much more attractive price, so it could be the more obvious choice for crypto mining rigs. The GTX 750 Ti still seems like a good more budget oriented solution for mining.
You should be well aware of the fact that some ccMiner forks are nor working very well with the GTX 980, we’ve had some weird results showing like way too little load and low hashrate or the miner crashing, also one of the reasons that not all available algorithms are listed. The GTX 980 and GTX 970 does support Compute 5.2 and not all forks of ccMiner we have used for testing are compiled to even support the Compute 5.0, the CudaMiner has not been updated for a while and we have used the latest official release for the Scrypt testing… not that you would use a GPU nowadays to mine Scrypt crypto coins anyway.