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Cloud mining is becoming more and more interesting alternative for mining not only Bitcoins, but for Litecoins as well. With the significant increase of the BTC network hashrate and difficulty cloud mining is getting more and more interesting alternative to buying ASIC devices and waiting for them to arrive, to setup them and to support them. Services such as CEX.io that offer you to buy Bitcoin mining hahrate in the cloud have generated a lot of attention and have attracted a lot of users. However the price per GHS there is quite high to just purchase GHS and mine Bitcoins with it on the long run, so we have been looking into new services that have better prices and options for cloud mining. We are already testing the PBmining BTC cloud mining service that offers the best price for long term investment into Bitcoin mining hashrate with the reason being that there is no exchange to trade it at, it is yours for 5 years. But we are also looking for Scrypt cloud mining services as these are still new and not many, due to the fact that Scrypt mining is still done mostly on GPU and there are still no very powerful ASIC devices available to replace the GPU for mining. So we have found another interesting service called Bit Mining that gives you the ability to purchase both SHA-256 (BTC) cloud mining hashrate as well as Scrypt (LTC) mining cloud hashrate. But what really caught our attention was the recent announcement that the service has partnered with Bitmaintech, the only company still shipping relatively powerful SHA-256 ASIC devices that are on stock. We have made a comparison between 180 GHS AntMiner S1 vs 180 GHS Cloud Mining Contract that you might be interested to check out.

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Bit Mining offers cloud mining BTC and LTC hashrate and there is an exchange where you can purchase GHS for Bitcoin mining with BTC as well as KHS for Littecoin mining with LTC. The price of SHA-256 cloud mining hashrate is currently about 0.017 BTC per GHS which is lower than the current exchange rate at CEX.io that is about 0.0197 BTC per GHS, but is almost twice higher than on PBmining where the current price is 0.0089 BTC per GHS (for a long term contract though, meaning you cannot sell it on an exchange). At the moment there are about 4537 GHS available for trade on the exchange, so significantly lower than on other cloud mining services with their own exchanges, but still more than enough for many people to get into cloud mining with a small investment just to try it out. So if you want to purchase 100 GHS Bitcoin cloud mining hashrate at Bit Mining you will have to pay for it about 1.7 BTC.

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Moving onto Scrypt cloud mining for LTC, you will have to pay with Litecoins for the hashrate (the exchange does have BTC/LTC trading as well, though not very active at the moment). Bit Mining currently sells on their exchange the Scrypt cloud mining hashrate for about 0.0745 LTC per GHS, or with other words 100 KHS will cost you about 7.5 LTC. With the current exchange rate of LTC per USD a 700 KHS hashrate that is pretty much equivalent to a clocked Radeon R9 280X video card will cost you about $900 USD. So significantly more expensive than getting the video card, but without any need to setup and maintain hardware or to pay for electricity etc. At this moment the cloud mining hashrate available on the Bit Mining exchange is about 2270 KHS, so not that much actually, but more than enough to start testing the service and as more hasrate is added if you are happy with the results you can get more.

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What we did for starters was to purchase 100 KHS of Scrypt mining hashrate about 2 days ago as apart of our test of the service and so far we are satisfied with the results. Even though we are seeing some things that still need some more work, mostly polishing the user interface and adding some useful extra functionality of the service itself. Things however do seem very promising and the hashrate prices are better than on some other cloud mining services with trading exchanges with good potential for growth. Bit Mining is paying out your earnings on a 24 hour basis and we have already received two payments from our purchased hashrate, so we can either withdraw them or reinvest them into more hashrate, there is even an option to set a percentage of your earning to be automatically reinvested into hashrate (something that is missing in most other cloud mining services).

Another interesting thing about the Bit Mining cloud mining service is that it also has its own pools that you can point your actual BTC and LTC mining hardware to mine at the same pool where you have the purchased cloud mining hashrate. You can actually mine at the LTC and BTC mining pools even if you don’t have any cloud mining hashrate and to invest your earnings into some cloud mining hashrate or just withdraw the earnings. The service has a 0% fee P2Pool node with a special feature – paying miners not based upon how many blocks are found, but based upon only how much work each miner does for both BTC and LTC mining. So if you mine with 100 GH for 1 day, you will receive exactly 0.013180047005724 BTC at the end of the day at the current difficulty. And if you mine with 100 KS for 1 day, you will receive exactly 0.027659086465469 LTC at the end of the day at the current difficulty. This makes it easier to do the numbers and see how much it will take to get a full return of your investment into cloud mining hashrate, though you will still have to take into account the variation of the difficulty increasing over time. If you are wondering what are the fees for the cloud mining hashrate, there is 6% SHA256 maintenance fee and 10% SCRYPT maintenance fee. There is also a 1% sale fee, which will be deducted from the earnings from your sale of hashrate on the marketplace, no fee when buying KHS or GHS.

So far what we could recommend is if you are interested to try out the service by purchasing a small amount of hashrate and see how things go for a few days and then decide to invest into more or not, this is exactly what we are doing already with out 100 KHS purchased Scrypt mining hashrate. For now we are more interested in the LTC cloud mining functionality of the service, but we are probably going to invest a bit in the BTC mining hashrate even though PBmining is our preferred choice for the moment for Bitcoin cloud mining where we have already uppded our cloud mining hashrate to 10 GHS for the next week of testing the service from the initial 1 GHS that we started with for the first week of testing the service. But it is up to you to decide to check out only the Scrypt cloud mining or the SHA-256 cloud mining hashrate as well that the service offers.

For more information about the Bit Mining BTC/LTC cloud mining service…

btcchina-litecoin-trading

The largest crypto currency exchange in China – BTC China has just announcing the addition of trading of Litecoins (LTC) with a 0% trading fee for the launch. This is probably going to result in the LTC exchange rate starting to get higher again. Below you can see the official statement from BTC China:

Dear Customers,

We are very excited to introduce BTC China’s new member – Litecoin!

Bitcoin grew tremendously in 2013, while another virtual currency has also made considerable progress – Litecoin. It gradually gained recognition from the Bitcoin enthusiasts. By popular request, we have now added Litecoin trading to BTC China’s trading platform.

In addition, Litecoin trading will have 0% trading commission!

As a responsible trading platform and a Bitcoin industry leader, BTC China is committed to providing a safe and secure platform. We always focus on the safety of customer’s funds.

We will strive to continue to offer the best service to our customers, so we appreciate any suggestions, comments and feedback.

Thank you for your support, and we wish you a happy and prosperous Year of the Horse!

For more information about the largest Chinese crypto currency exchange BTC China…

block-erupter-cube-thermal-images

The Block Erupter Cube Bitcoin ASICs are the latest products (though already a few months old) to come out from the company ASICMiner – the same company that made the small USB sticks for mining Bitcoins. These ASIC devices are capable of 32 to 38 GHS (stock and overclocked) and come with a small form factor, but with a relatively high power consumption to be good choice to continue mining for much longer. We got our hands on one of these devices and decided to check it out and report some interesting things we’ve found out about it and that you will probably not find anywhere else. Like for example the thermal images of the miner in action that you can see above that give interesting insight into the operation of the miner. You can see that inside of the device can get pretty hot, while the outside aluminum case remains pretty cool, so the cooling is apparently quite effective in moving air through the chips to keep them operating problem free even when overclocked, even though the chips temperature can go as high as 80 degrees Celsius. Another interesting finding is that the safety fuse on the back of the device can get pretty hot, so e careful with the fuse while the device is working.

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The inside of the Block Erupter Cube Bitcoin ASIC consists of a main control board and six modules with chips, each of the boards with chips has 16 chips and the total number of chips inside the device is 96. These are the same chips that are found on the Block Erupter USB devices, so they are not very power efficient nowadays as compared to other alternative solutions available. As you can see the idle power consumption of the ASICMiner Block Erupter Cube is 130W and having the device overclocked to run at 38 GHS the power consumption can go up to about 350W (measured at the power outlet). The high power consumption is with the relatively low hashrate already is what is making these a bit outdated and in a few more jumps in the Bitcoin difficulty.

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The Block Erupter Cube devices comes with a built-in web management interface that also allows you to switch between the normal and overclocked operation mode with a click of a button. The web interface lets you enter the pool settings, so the device can operate without the need of a computer, however it only supports getwork and not stratum. And with stratum pools you need to use a stratum proxy in order to be able to connect to a stratum pool and that needs to be installed on a computer. We have managed to get about 37 GHS stable hashrate from the unit we have tested in the overclocked state and it was running stable and reliable for the whole week of testing that we did. And while the Block Erupter Cube ASIC miners do have some specifics, they do look nice and well built and already can be found quite cheap, pretty soon there will no be much point in mining for Bitcoins with them, unless you don’t pay for the electricity used. So do not get very tempted by a too attractive price for a Cube miner and better consider another ASIC alternative for mining Bitcoins that provides higher hashrate and uses less power.

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