Posts Tagged ‘CEXIO

bitmaintech-antminer-s1-asic-miner

The fresh information from CEX.io about the addition of an option to buy future mining contracts for Bitcoin has made us thing and calculate how profitable are they if we compare them to what other options are already available to start mining immediately. We are going to do a comparison between the FHA contracts (purchasing cloud mining hashrate for the end of April) that you can already purchase to the currently being shipped Bitmain AntMiner S1 BTC ASICs and to a BTC cloud mining service that is already available and running by offering 5 year Bitcoin mining contracts, namely the PB Mining Bitcoin cloud mining service. We are going to compare how much it will cost you to purchase 1 Terahash (1 THS or 1000 GHS) worth of Bitcoin mining hashrate at each of these services.

1 THS of ASIC mining hardware currently shipping:
– 5x 180 GHS Bitmain AntMiner S1 overclocked to 200 GHs each
– This will cost you about 5 BTC for the moment for the miners
– You will need power supplies for about 2100W for them
– You will need to pay for 2.1 KW of power an hour for electricity
– Miners will be at your door in a week and you will start mining

1 THS of PB Mining cloud hashrate currently being sold:
– The current cloud mining hasrate price is 0.0083 BTC per 1 GHS
– You will need to pay 8.3 BTC at the moment for 1000 GHS
– The cloud hashrate will start mining for you in a few hours
– No extra cost for electricity or need to support hardware
– This is a long term mining contract for 5 years that you purchase

1 THS of CEX future cloud hashrate for end of April (FHA):
– The current contract price for FHA is about 0.00799999 BTC per 1 GHS
– You will need to pay 7.999 BTC for a purchase of 1000 GHS contract
– The cloud hashrate will start mining in about month and a half for you
– No extra cost for electricity or need to support hardware
– You can sell or trade the cloud mining hashrate contract at anytime

So it seems that all of the above options do have their own advantages, but there are disadvantages as well. It is up to you to decide what seems the most reasonable for you at this moment if any of the options is a viable alternative for you. Based on our experience, the AntMiners are very good product and the company making them is really fast and ships from stock (if ordering directly from them), not to mention the always up to date prices going down with the difficulty increase. The PiggyBack Mining cloud mining service so far is working great based on our few weeks of experience using it, they also update prices after difficulty increase. The use of CEX.io for cloud mining is not so good of long term investment in mining hashrate due to the higher prices driver by the users trading on exchange, but if you use the platform for trade and treat the cloud mining as just an extra profit while trading it is not a bad option.

litecoin-double-cex

It seems to be official now after digging a bit around the CexIO website we found some information that “LTC Cloud mining is coming soon” and adding the Litecoin mining pool at Ghash.io is apparently only the first step. The currently running promotion for doubled rewards for Litecoin mining for a week in the new LTC pool is apparently a good trick to attract a lot of user attention and after this week ends the service will most likely start offering LTC cloud mining and trading to go along with the already available BTC cloud mining and trading functionality. And apparently things are already working pretty well with the current pool speed of the Litecoin mining pool at 5.76 GHS and growing as more and more people are joining in. The 100% extra profitability promised over the standard LTC mined is an offer that is not easy to pass at the moment with the not so high profitability of other alternative cryptos, so the news is spreading pretty fast.

The CexIO account Balance page already shows some new things such as the FHM and FHA balance that apparently stands for future mining contracts. 1 FHA and 1 FHM stands for futures contract for 1 GHS that will start mining for you on 26th of April and May respectively with both already traded on the website’s exchange. The purchase of future hashrate at a much lower price of 0.00399999 BTC per FHA or 0.00399999 BTC per FHM. The total FHA (April) is 1000000 GHS (1000 THS) and the total FHM (May) on the exchange is 900000 meaning that apparently there are 900000 GHS (900 THS) more that will be added at CexIO and you can pre-order now. It is very much like pre-ordering a BTC ASIC, but with an exact date for delivery and easier to calculate the break even in time. This however does not mean that these future cloud mining hashrate contracts will be profitable as there are many variables to take into account as well as with pre-orders for ASIC hardware.

ghashio-new-mining-pools

The Ghash.io mining pool that is a part of the CexIO Bitcoin cloud mining service has been silently adding new Scrypt-based pools, starting with a Litecoin (LTC) mining pool in the last few days. The initial addition of LTC pool was a sign of a possible upcoming LTC cloud mining, however after the addition of a DOGE, FTC and AUR pools to the service we no longer consider this to be the case. That and the fact that the account Balance section at CexIO did not get new currencies available hints to another thing.

It seems that the idea of the service is to attract new miners that are using GPUs for mining by adding Scrypt mining pools, miners that would apparently get paid directly in Bitcoins regardless of the Scrypt crypto they are mining. The Ghash.io pool even announced doubled rewards for LiteCoin mining in order to attract more miners, however when the countdown just reached 0 it started to increase, so we are not sure what and how is this going to work. The whole idea here is probably to attract more customers to purchase and trade GHS for cloud mining Bitcoin, but as long as you get an extra bonus why not take advantage of it while it lasts.

Update: it seems that they have fixed the countdown issues, now it says:
Doubled rewards for LiteCoin mining ends in [6 days, 22 hours, 5 minutes, and 53 seconds]

Also we’ve have received our first reward from found block and it was credited to the LTC account in Litecoin at CexIO, but we are not yet sure what is the situation with the other alternative Scrypt coins that already have pools setup and working. There has been an update for the the DOGE, FTC and AUR currency sign in the pools, but the account Balance page still does not have these new crypto currencies available. Note that the CEX and Ghash websites use the same account, so you only need one registration to be able to use them.

For more information about the Ghash.io mining pool and to try the LTC mining functionality…


top