Our Experience Using the CoinKing Multipool Mining Service

4 Jul
2014

coinking-dashboard

We’ve been using the CoinKing multipool for over two weeks already, trying it out, and we are ready to share some feedback based on our own personal experience. When we have started with CoinKing it was one of the most profitable automatic profit based coin switching pool according to PoolPicker and currently it is still the most profitable one for few of the crypto algorithms supported by the service. CoinKing offers an nice looking and easy to use service, supports a lot of coins and most of the more popular algorithms and gives the users an option to automatically exchange the mined coins not only in the more traditional BTC and LTC, but in many other coins as well. The standard pool fee is 1% and if you decide to use the automatic exchange of the mined coins into some other crypto currency there will be another extra fee for the conversion process (the fees are the ones charged by the exchange used for the conversion), different based on the coin you select to get the payout in. Another very useful thing that we’ve liked a lot is the list of many notifications that you can activate manually, so you know when the pool does something like automatic payout or coin conversion etc.

coinking-multiports-and-coins

The pool has Scrypt, Scrypt-N, SHA256, X11 and X13 multiports and you have the option to either mine in a multipool configuration with CoinKing choosing the most profitable coin at the moment based on the exchange price and network difficulty or to mine directly a specific coin you choose from the list of supported ones. We like that CoinKing is constantly adding new coins, so that the profitability for the miners can remain high and some coins do get removed as well for the same reason. It is no wonder that the poll is keeping top places in terms of profitability as many other pools kind of forget to add new coins and remove old ones thus mining no so profitable coins and offer a lower additional profit. In CoinKing you will see that the highest number of supported coins is in the Scrypt and X11 domains as with the other supported algorithms there are not so many coins available, or at least not so much that are more established and offer good profitability.

coinking-wallets-and-conversion

One of the best things we like the most with CoinKing is the fact that you can select not only to mine specific coin or the automatically the most profitable coin, but also can get what you have mined automatically converted to a coin of your choice. You can either individually set if the coin should be converted automatically or not or do it all in a single click for all coins. Furthermore you can select to convert one mined coin into another of the supported and you set that on per coin basis, so you can mine LTC and have them converted in BTC, but you can also set to mine DarkCoin and have the mined coins automatically converted to BlackCoin for example. Yes, there is support for automatic conversion into coins that have finished their POW phase and are now POS only. Currently there are 19 different coins that you can have your mined coins automatically converted into and in this list more coins are being added as well, including POS only coins. This way POS only coins can get buy support from users that want to mine the most profitable coin and get instead a coin of their liking that they want to support such as Minerals for example.

Now, if everything does look too good to be true, then there is some catch. Well actually we found one thing that we did not like that much using the service. According to the information on the website the automatic conversions should run 4 times a day, or every 6 hours, but we’ve seen these happening more like once a day. There are some minimum limits for a conversion to be executed, but in order for miner with smaller hashrate the mined coins should be combined and exchanged. This however does not seem to be running so well or the limits may be too high, as after two weeks of use we still have some coins that have not yet been converted. Another not so convenient thing is that when a new coin gets added in the pool you need to manually go and configure the automatic conversion for it, as by default the conversion is disabled, so you need to keep an eye on the news section of the pool. In general however we are satisfied with our experience using the CoinKing multipool, we haven’t had serious problems so far, and can recommend you to try it out yourself if you are looking for a new place to mine. Do note however that some people had various issues with the pool, so if you have experienced some yourself feel free to share them below.

– For more information about the CoinKing multipool and to try it out yourself…

Litecoin Difficulty vs Litecoin Price in the Last Month

3 Jul
2014

litecoin-difficulty-graph

In the last month or so we have seen a steady increase in the network difficulty of Litecoin, the second biggest crypto currency at the moment after Bitcoin, in terms of market capitalization. This is direct result from more and more Scrypt ASIC miners being shipped to customers by companies such as Gridseed, Zeus and Innosilicon, even though most of the GPU miners have already moved to other crypto algorithms that do not yet have ASICs such as X11, X13 and others. What we are essentially seeing is centralization of the Scrypt mining hashrate in the hands of larger miners and mining farms, even though there are still quite a few small miners that have purchased some of the more affordable Gridseed and ZeusMiner Scrypt ASIC miners. In fact, what is getting more attractive for the normal small time miner are the services offering to host miners or even for cloud mining, as these cloud be easier to calculate and are more predictable over the long term and most of all no delivery times, extra cost and having to manage and monitor hardware all of the time. Unfortunately there is yet not enough competition like in the Bitcoin cloud mining segment for such services, so the price and features offered to customers are not yet that great, but hopefully we are soon going to see some more advancement in this field as well.

litecoin-price-graph

At the same time, with Litecoin getting harder to mine because of the increase of the network difficulty, what we are seeing is also a decrease of the price instead of increase. Interestingly enough, up until recently, Litecoin’s price was reacting pretty much the same way as Bitcoin’s, so it went up and down as the price of BTC increased or decreased, but that is not happening anymore. If this is a good sign or not is still early to tell, but since LTC is not yet as established as Bitcoin and the hardware manufacturers, especially the companies making ASIC miners may still see LTC as an extra source of income, apart from their sales of mining hardware, by mining in their own mining farms and dumping coins on the market instead of using some of their profits in order to support the crypto currency to be able to sell more hardware. As the moment with the current prices of most Scrypt ASICs and the performance they offer it is hard to decide to invest in them or not, especially when knowing that in a month or two there will be much more powerful solutions starting to hit the market, products that will seriously increase the network difficulty.

Furthermore, apart from LTC (number two) and maybe DOGE (currently number 7 in terms of market cap), there are no other more established and serious in terms of market capitalization Scrypt-based crypto currencies among the top 20. Feathercoin (FTC) is the closest one that takes the third place in terms of market capitalization among Scrypt crypto currencies in 23rd place at the moment, but it is much smaller than DOGE, let alone LTC. Then there is Karmacoin at 26th place, however the team behind this coin has already announced plans to move away from Scrypt, CureCoin at 27th place, PotCoin is 28th and a few others close by. There are also not a lot of new Scrypt-based coin launches happening lately, with maybe only Razor being a more interesting recent launch. So what will be the near future of Litecoin and other Scrypt currencies, it is still hard to predict, but we are still remaining positive about it and hope to see more decentralization of the network, instead of centralization as that is never a good thing in the world of crypto currencies.

What is Going On With New Altcoin Launches These Days

2 Jul
2014

mj-alt-coin-specifications

It seems that lately there are just very few new alternative coins worth mining and they are getting fewer and fewer. We are still seeing multiple coin launches every day, but the ones that look decent or even worth checking out are getting less and less. Large percentage for IPO or Pre-mine, no actual reason for a coin’s existence or a plan for development, quick POW phase and then POS resulting in mine and dump as soon a the coin hits an exchange. Not to mention that with many people renting their rigs and selling hashrate you can easily get a lot of hashrate to mine a new coin and then you just want to dump the mined coins with profit and then move to the next new launch. All this is driving away people from new coins, but it will hopefully result in the launch of more reasonable coins taking over… just like how the interest in “country coins” has declined. We need quality and not just quantity, we need innovation in order for things to move on. Now everyone is giving empty (mostly) promises about anonymity, but with Darkcoin not doing so well after the recent boom and new coins not being able to deliver on empty promises about anonymity, this is also getting old. So more and more miners prefer to start selling their hashrate with expected stable profit or to mine in multipools with some extra profit and direct payment directly in BTC to save themselves time and headaches. So what comes up next?

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