litecoing-network-difficulty-latest

The last week or so you have probably seen the Litecoin difficulty increasing significantly, but now it should get back to a more normal level getting down a bit, though the steady and slow growth may still continue. The reason for the rapid growth in the last week was most likely the CexIO Doubled Rewards for Litecoin Mining promotion that has attracted a lot of attention. This has lead to many users switching from various alternative crypto currencies to LTC mining, but now that this promotion is over they are getting back to other more profitable coins and pool with automatic profit switching instead of directly mining Litecoin. Another thing that has probably lead to increase in the difficulty and Litecoin popularity (the spike in LTC price as well) in the last few days was the announcements of for LTC trading in two of the biggest crypto currency exchanges in China. And then there is of course the Gridseed with their BTC/LTC mining ASIC devices that are selling really fast and adding more and more hashrate to LTC and other Scrypt crypto currencies.

In the long term we should be seeing the price of LTC getting higher and the coin getting more independent from Bitcoin as it will also become harder to mine due to the increase in difficulty. Later this year we are expecting other companies that are making Scrypt ASIC devices to also start shipping more powerful hardware such as the 5 MHS and 25 MHS Alpha Technologies ASIC miners as well as the just recently announced 100 MHS Titan ASIC from KnCMiner. Other companies might as well release products and Gridseed will most likely as well offer a more powerful mining solution combining more than 5 chips in a single device. This all will inevitably lead LTC on the same way that BTC has gone already, taking away the coin from the many users mining with GPUs and moving the generation of larger amounts of Litecoins to the serious miners that can invest in a lot of ASIC mining hardware. All of this will bring forward other alternative cryptos that are not based on the Scrypt algorithm as ASIC devices designed for it will be able to mine all Scrypt coins, so coins with other algorithms may get more popular. GPU miners will probably move to coins using Scrypt-Adaptive-Nfactor, SHA-3 Keccak, Scrypt-Jane and other of the many algorithms.

cloud-mining-services

We have decided to post a short update on our progress in testing various cloud mining services for mining Bitcoins and Litecoins without having to purchase any hardware, instead you just rent hardware that mines for you. We are already testing a few of these services and have shared some experience and feedback and will continue to as we continue using them. The biggest concern with most cloud mining services is if they are here to stay and will not take away your coins or money and run away with them. This is especially true with new services that have just launched and the way they run and the information they provide raises some concerns. That is why we are proceeding with caution when using them and start with small investment in hashrate for a few weeks to see how they will work and try them for a while.

Bitcoin/Litecoin Cloud Mining Services:

CexIO is the oldest and biggest Bitcoin cloud mining service, no concerns there, though our experience has shown that it is good mostly for trading GHS/BTC and long term investment in Bitcoin cloud mining hashrate does not work that well. Apparently the service is soon planning to launch Litecoin cloud mining as well, but it is still not available. Currently the price of 1 GHS worth of Bitcoin cloud mining hashrate is around 0.0117 BTC. The service has a dedicated pool that you may also point your own mining hardware to mine with a 0% fee for Bitcoins and since recently for LTC as well.

PiggyBack Mining is a Bitcoin cloud mining service intended for long term investment as there is no exchange where you can buy/sell the purchased hashrate at any time. The service offers one of the best prices per GHS for BTC cloud mining hashrate and you purchase it in the form of a contract for 5 years. Currently the price per 1 GHS is 0.0078 BTC and the price gets down usually every difficult increase of the Bitcoin network. The only drawback is that you are getting paid your mined earnings once a week. We’ve been using the service for a few weeks already and had absolutely not trouble with them.

Bit Mining is a service that we just recently started using, even though it has been operating for a few months already with Bitcoin cloud mining service, though we are more interested in the more recently launched LTC cloud mining as well. The company has announced a partnership with the BTC ASIC maker Bitmain not long ago, but more recently they have been hacked and for the last about 10 days already they have been fixing things. The service is almost back to normal operation and everything in our account is back to normal and the only thing left is probably the restoration of the automatic withdraw payments as currently they are confirmed manually and it can take some time for the coins to be available in your wallet (up to about a day in our experience). The prices are currently around 0.0098 BTC per 1 GHS for Bitcoin mining and 0.047 LTC for Litecoin mining. There are also pools that you can point your mining hardware to mine for you with 0% pool fee along with your cloud mining hashrate.

MarketsCX is a new cloud mining service that has launched just recently as a Litecoin cloud mining service with an exchange that relies on Gridseed ASIC hardware. The service had some hiccups in its operation like delayed withdraws that we have experienced a few times, but seems to be working stable and is here to stay. We’ve had some concerns about it initially, but it seems that they might not be a problem. What we did not like initially was the fact that the price per KHS worth of Litecoin cloud mining hashrate has dropped significantly in very short time, probably due to the significant processing power available at the service. The good new is that if you are just starting the service you can purchase hashrate very cheap, probably the lowest price available at only 0.022 LTC per KHS. The service has just started adding BTC cloud mining option as well, but it is not yet fully operational. Since this is a new and unproven service we do recommend to be careful and start small if you want to give it a try!

ScryptCC is the first Litecoin cloud mining service that we’ve tried a while ago and we were very excited about it at first. Unfortunately we were very disappointed soon after we started testing the service as they’ve had some small but annoying bugs and issues that we reported multiple times and now more than a month later they are still not being addressed. We gave up on the service completely as apparently the support is virtually non existent there, but we check from time to time if there is any change. We are also reporting the problems from time to time again hoping that they will be resolved for the users that still continue using the service. We would not recommend that service to anyone, so stay away from it, there are already other alternatives available.

Cloud Hashing is a Bitcoin cloud mining service that has been available for some time and seems to be a very serious one according to what they claim (2.87 PHS total hasrate), but we still haven’t given it a try. We plan on trying out the service soon and what has been stopping us so far are the not so attractive price they have for the hashrate that you can purchase in the form of a 1 year contract. You are not able to purchase less than 85 GHS as a minimum, so not easy to test the service with a low investment before deciding if it is worth to invest more. Still worth checking it out and we’ll soon be giving it a try with a small 85 GHS contract in order to be able to give a proper review of the service based on our experience using it.

heavycoin-optimized-cgminer-gpu-miner

There have been some updates in the Heavycoin GPU miner that bring out extra performance, so we have compiled a windows binary from the latest source. The results are quite good and we do recommend you to update the miner if you are still using the older version to mine HVC on AMD graphic cards. With the older release that we have compiled and published here we’ve got around 5.1 MHS from a single Radeon R9 280X GPU and with the latest binary we are getting up to about 7.2 MHS with the same hardware, so definitely a very good improvement performance wise. Below you can download cgminer 3.7.3 with support for HVC GPU mining compiled for windows.

You can download cgminer 3.7.3 with Heavycoin support for Windows here…

top