It Is All About BTC, LTC, ETH, DOGE, KAS mining as well as other alternative crypto currencies
Bitmain, one of the top names among the Bitcoin ASIC miner manufacturers, has announced their acquisition of Hashnest – a cloud mining platform which was originally named Snowball Exchange (Snowball.io). Hashnest’s goal is to operate independently in order to build a reliable, economical and decentralized platform that serves the worldwide mining enthusiasts and hosting operators according to the new owner. Originally Snowball was more of a trade platform where you buy and sell actual hosted miners and popular only in China, but it seems that they are moving to providing hashrate to users that is backed up by a large mining farm(s) and opening to the rest to the world. We are not surprised from this news as we’ve recently discussed that cloud mining is going to become more and more attractive alternative to using physical miners for users that are mining crypto currencies. Do note however that as far as Hashnest is considered it is not regarded as a cloud mining service, but as a platform and there is a difference.
UMISOO, the first operator on Hashnest will provide 4 PHS of hashing power, and plans to start the Round 1 subscription at Beijing Time 22:00pm, 2nd September, 2014 (UCT+8:00 Time Zone). The price is flat at 0.0016 BTC per GHS. Due to the anticipated high demand, each user is limited to a maximum of 1000 GHS by default, though this limit can be increased further. The Round 1 hashrate is generated by AntMiner S2 mining hardware (4000 units) with a maintenance fee of $0.0032424 per GHS per Day. Doing some calculations if you purchase 1 THS hashrate you will currently be earning about 0.01834 BTC per day (about $8.78 USD) and the maintenance fee will be $3.2424 USD or the fee is about 37% of what you earn at the moment. The fee is a bit high, though the price per GHS on the other hand is very attractive compared to what other alternative cloud mining operations are currently offering. Even though doing some long term calculations it would take more than a year for you to just ROI, unless of course there is some significant increase in the Bitcoin price that will cause the fee percentage to get lower as it is calculated in dollar price.
– If you are interested in checking out the new Bitmain Hashnest cloud mining service yourself…
This is something hat you normally would not expect to happen, to see the prices of cloud mining hashrate to increase instead to get down as time passes, but we are seeing this happening in the last days with more than just one service. Normally the price of cloud mining hashrate should decrease over time as the network difficulty increases and as better hardware becomes available (higher performance and lower power usage). It seems however that lately there is so much interest in cloud mining from users that the already available services are having hard time meeting the demand for hashrate. The normal result in this case is to temporary increase the price, so that the number of new users should be lower, at least until you get enough capacity in terms of mining hardware to cover the demand.
A good example is the GAW Miners Hashlet that has generated quite a lot of buzz when it was launched with a price of just $15.99 USD for 1 MHS worth of Scrypt mining hashrate. At this price per megahash it was really attractive option to invest into and the result was a lot of hashrate being purchased by miners. Apparently the demand from users was so high that the price has been increased first to $19.99 USD and then a second time a bit later on up to $24.99, a price that is over 55% higher and not that attractive anymore. This means 55% more time to ROI now as compared to the initial price that the early adopters got when buying Hashlets and in the world of mining this is really significant increase.
But it is not only GAW, another big cloud mining service, namely PBMining has also done something similar and unlike with LTC the Bitcoin difficulty does not temporary drop, but continues to steadily increase. Previously the service was selling 1 GHS hashrate for 0.0029 BTC, but their latest price has been increased to 0.0033 BTC. Not so significant increase as in the case above, but still going up by about 14% is not little and definitely not something that you would normally expect to see. This is actually the first time we are seeing an increase with that service and we’ve seen them stopping to take orders at times when the available hashrate from the supposed ASIC mining hardware in the backend has depleted.
Another similar example is the service called Bitcoin Cloud Services that has also increased the rate of their rate for 1 GHS worth of Bitcoin mining hahsrate. Their previous price was at 0.0026 per GHS, right after they were temporary out of stock for a bit and were not selling hashrate. Their current price however has been increased up to 0.0029 per GHS which is probably the most attractive Bitcoin cloud mining price that you can get at the moment.
With other cloud mining services such as Cex.io for example there hasn’t been too much of a change, but there the price per GHS is driven by the users that trade on the website’s exchange. Of course because of that fact the prices there tend to be higher than on other competing services such as some of the ones mentioned already. Other services such as CloudHashing than tend to remain pretty expensive and don’t update their prices often are not having such problems, so that they don’t get the need to increase the prices further. All this however seems to point to the fact that there is an increased demand from users for cloud mining services, especially ones that actually can deliver relatively quick ROI and miners can thing about getting some profit investing in them. As a result we expect to see some more competition in the cloud mining services especially now when many ASIC manufacturers are also working on offering cloud mining services along with their new and upcoming mining hardware.
Genesis Mining has announced that will start to offer Bitcoin mining contracts starting Thursday, August 28th 2014 or with other words tomorrow. The new Bitcoin mining contracts will be introduced at very competitive prices starting at as little as $2.15 per GH/s according to the company. And the pricing is transparent: there are no additional fees or hidden costs. Up to now Genesis Mining has been offering only Scrypt cloud mining and we’ve been using the service for quite a while already and testing it, our initial impressions can be found here.
Genesis Mining has been open on what hardware they are using to back up the cloud mining hashrate they sell to users and also is one of the few companies into the cloud mining business that allows the user some control on what currency to be mined/payed in such as LTC, DOGE or BTC for example. Similar functionality should also be available to the Bitcoin cloud mining users who will be able to choose to mine other SHA-256 coins such as Peercoin or Namecoin for example. If you are wondering about the supplier of the Genesis Mining of Scrypt ASIC miners, it is ZeusMiner and the company that they have partnered for the SHA-256 mining hardware is apparently Spondoolies-Tech.
We do plan to purchase some Bitcoin cloud mining hashrate as soon as it becomes available and to do a short review of the new BTC mining functionality that should be introduced tomorrow, so stay tuned for our first impressions.
Update: 28th has passed and the Bitcoin cloud mining functionality is not yet available, it is not wise to announce a date and then not to deliver the promised things on it. Furthermore there is not a single word on either Twitter or Facebook about why and when we are actually going to see the functionality available. This is the easiest way to loose the users trust – promising and not keeping your promises, and not giving an excuse on you were not able to!