Posts Tagged ‘cloud mining’

Cloud Mining Services Increase Prices Instead of Lowering Them

28, Aug 2014

cloud-mining-services

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 To Start Offering Bitcoin Cloud Mining

27, Aug 2014

genesis-mining-logo

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!

Review of the GAW Miners Hashlet Digital Cloud Miner

19, Aug 2014

gawminers-hashlets

A few days have passed since the introduction of the GAW Miners Digital Cloud Miner – the Hashlet and we’ve been testing it since the sales of the cloud miner have started and we have purchased a 5 MHS Hashlet. So now it is time to do a report on our experience using the miner and of course the thing that probably most of you are wondering about – the profitability you can expect. We already have some numbers to share, even though at the moment the Litecoin and other Scrypt-based crypto coins are not very stable in terms of price and the trend if going down and not up. With the current unstable market situation you need to be careful and wise when doing a decision to invest into a mining service or ASIC miner, unless you believe that things will soon improve and the prices will get back up as many people into crypto currencies do.

hashlet-zencloud-dashboard

After purchasing a 5 MHS Hashlet, a relatively quick and easy process, though it sometimes might take a bit more time than we needed, we have moved to activating our hashrate in the ZenCloud website. The ZenCloud service is that is also used by GAW Miners for the hosted ASIC miners, including the Scrypt and SHA-256 devices, however since we haven’t used the service before it is new for us. If you have purchased a hosted miner you may already be familiar with the service and how it operates, but we’ll go through the important things for the people that are new to it like us. One very important thing to note is that the Hashlet is a digital cloud miner for mining Scrypt crypto currencies in a multipool and you are getting paid in Bitcoins.

The main Dashboard panel is the place where you get all of the basic details that you need when you login to your account – information such as the current hashrate or what was the last payout that you got. Do note that the Hashlet gets current and hourly hashrate reported, however the generated payment is credited to your account once every 24 hours. The Dashboard page gives you the total amount of coins earned for the last 24 hours, however the actual amount you get is a bit lower due to this number not reflecting the deduction of the maintenance fees. On to top right of every page you can see what is the current amount of BTC you have in your account since the last payment and their average USD value based on the current Coinbase exchange rate.

hashlet-zencloud-miners

The Miners panel from the menu on the left is where you actually add the Hashlet that you have purchased by redeeming the ZenHardware code that you have received and then you get to see the Hashlet you have purchased, but unless you set a mining pool it will not start to mine. Setting a mining pool could be a bit confusing at first as you need to drag the pool icon from the Altcoin list of pools on the right over the Hashlet, or you can use the Batch Update pools if you have more than one Hashlet to make it easier.

Once you drag the pool icon over tha Hashlet, below you will see the icon of the pool appear and the expected daily payout from that pool based on the estimation for your hashrate from the previous day. Obviously the highest payout is the ZenPool as GAW Miners have promised, but you can alternatively select to use Clever Mining, Multipool.us, NiceHash, TradeMyBit or WafflePool as alternatives. The important thing here however is that regardless of which pool you choose you are not setting worker information and you are only getting paid in BTC directly, so you cannot mine some altcoins and get them in your account with the Hashlet – only direct Bitcoin payments. Below you can see what are the current 24 hour estimated for 5 MHS Hashlet with the different supported pools.

5 MHS Hashlet Current Pool Profitability per 24 hours:

Clever Mining – 0.00237291 BTC
Multipool.us – 0.00218895 BTC
NiceHash – 0.00251380 BTC
TradeMyBit – 0.00230103 BTC
WafflePool – 0.00245989 BTC
ZenPool – 0.00309374 BTC

These numbers show that the ZenPool gives a bit over 20% higher profit as compared to the second most profitable pool in the list, and how exactly do they manage to get the extra profit apart from the lack of pool fee we do not know. Do note that these numbers represent the expected profit without the maintenance fee, so what you actual get credited in your account may be less. You can however also get more depending on the price fluctuations on the specific day of mining, especially if the prices the previous day were low. Even though we seem to be seeing pretty close numbers from day to day so far.

hashlet-zencloud-balance

The Latest Activity panel is kind of history log on what have you been doing in the control panel, logging the time and the action you have performed. The next panel called Balance is that one you will want to use more often as it shows the list of your financial transactions – the mined coins and the maintenance fee. It can be a bit confusing as it apparently shows first the maintenance feed deducted and then the full amount of mined coins added the same as in the Latest Activity. This way it seems that for the first day we have not been deducted any fee, even though we have mined for just a few hours as you can also see from the amount of mined coins.

The Balance panel is also the place where you can either deposit or withdraw BTC in your account. Both buttons however do have some weird rounding applied as per the current Coinbase exchange rate that makes entering an exact value real pain in the ass, and while it may be useful when depositing BTC, it is really annoying when withdrawing as you want to enter an exact value that you have in your account. If you are wondering why you would need to add BTC in your account, the reason is simple – to purchase more Hashlets from the ZenMarket panel instead of going through the standard purchasing procedure that you need to go over if you do not yet have a ZenCloud account.

hashlet-maintenance-cost

We’ve been talking about the fee, but we have not yet mentioned what exactly is the maintenance fee that you need to pay for the Hashlet digital cloud miner. It has been set to $0.08 USD per MHS per day, so for our 5 MHS Hashlet we need to pay 40 USD cents per day for the fee from our total mined coins. Our profit for the first day of mining (only a few hours actually) was lower than $0.40, however we were not deducted a fee for that day and after that for the next two days we have managed to get the fee to be about 1/4 of the total mined coins or with other words close to 25% with the current not so favorable Scrypt prices. Obviously since the Hashlet is not time limited cloud mining contract, the time that it should expire is when the mined coins are not enough to cover the fees as this would make the miner unprofitable and you would not want to actually have to pay to be able to continue mining instead of making money from it. This is the way we understand and expect things to go with the Hashlet as this piece of information regarding the lifetime of the digital miner is not clearly described by GAW Miners yet.

Below you can see what the actual earnings are by days that we have accumulated in our account from mining so far with the 5 MHS Hashlet. Note that these are the values with the maintenance fee already deducted from them. The first number in BTC represents the total account balance after that specific day, the number with plus in the brackets shows the actual mined coins for the specific day other than the first one (this is minus the fee) and in the end of the line you can see the average estimated USD price of the available coins.

Day 1 (only few hours of mining)
– 0.00061710 BTC ~ 0.31 USD

Day 2
0.00314709 BTC (+ 0.00252999 BTC) ~ 1.48 USD

Day 3
0.00580333 BTC (+ 0.00265624 BTC) ~ 2.83 USD

Day 4
0.00825451 BTC (+ 0.00245118 BTC) ~ 3.90 USD

Day 5
0.01116123 BTC (+ 0.00290672 BTC) ~ 5.84 USD

Day 6
0.01366939 BTC (+ 0.00250816 BTC) ~ 6.92 USD

Day 7
0.01627877 BTC (+ 0.00260938 BTC) ~ 8.27 USD

So the current actual profit for 5 MHS Hashlet is equivalent to about 1.20-1.30 USD per day after we deduct the maintenance fee from the mined coins. That would mean we’ll need around 65 days (a little over 2 months) to get a return of the investment of $79.99 USD for purchasing the 5 MHS Hashlet if the conditions remain the same – something that will hardly happen. We already know that the network difficulty will most likely continue to increase, but what we don’t know yet is what is going to happen with the price of LTC and other Scrypt-based crypto currencies in the next 2-3 months. So in fact we can ROI faster or slower than that number of days, depending on a lot of factors, but breaking even in just about 2-3 months does not sound like a bad thing as after that you can expect to actually make some profit. How much actually depends on the purchased hashrate and the current market conditions when you have earned enough to cover your initial investment. Do note however that since you are getting paid in BTC, if the Bitcoin exchange rate for example doubles you can instantly lower the time for ROI, but if the opposite thing happens the time will double. And as we usually do recommend, do not invest more than you can afford to lose if things do not go the way you planned it. It is also not a wise idea to invest all in just one place, so think about spreading to multiple services.

– For more information about the Hashlet Digital Cloud Miner by GAW Miners…


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