Posts Tagged ‘cloud mining

genesis-mining

Genesis Mining is a relatively new and interesting Scrypt cloud mining service provider that has apparently been operating for a bit over a month already, so we have decided to give it a try and have been testing it for a few days already. The company behind the service is apparently registered in Bermuda (the address is listed on the website), though interestingly enough the agreement when purchasing hashrate says “This Agreement is governed by German law”. It seems that Genesis Mining has already attended some Bitcoin and crypto currencies related conferences as sponsors or speaker, and the fact that they have been around for a while and that they are actively developing the service makes them seem more trustworthy. Though as usual we advise caution when checking out new services of this type as you may never know for sure, so never invest more than you can afford to lose.

Genesis Mining offers the ability not to mine only Litecoin, but also multiple other Scrypt crypto currencies such as DOGE for example with user control what to be mined. There is an option to be payed in Bitcoins as well, with the service automatically mining the most profitable coins for you and exchanging them for BTC. Also you get to receive your earnings on a daily basis directly sent to your wallet, definitely an advantage over some other alternatives that do have weekly payments for example. Another good thing is that there are no hidden fees to pay such as percentage from your earnings for hardware maintenance or electricity bills, you pay a fixed price for the hashrate you want to rent and it is yours for a period of 1 year.

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The standard cloud hashrate plans offered by Genesis Mining are for 2 MHS, 10 MHS and 50 MHS, though there is an option that allows you to set a custom hashrate like for example 1 MHS. For the purposes of our test we have purchased 1 MHS worth of Scrypt hashrate in order to try out the service and report our experience with it. The payment types currently accepted include Euro, USD as well as Litecoin or Bitcoin. 1 MHS of Scrypt hashpower currently costs 0.291 BTC, though when you increase the MHS you can get better price per MHS, so for example 10 MHS will cost you 2.585 BTC and 50 MHS will cost you 11.308 BTC. The page for ordering hashpower has an option to enter a promo code as well, you can use the following up to date promo code to get a 5% discount of the regular price CryptoMiningBlog5. This code does give you a good opportunity to test out the service starting with one or just a few MHS at a better price than the standard one.

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After we have purchased our 1 MHS hashrate for testing it took less than an hour for our payment in Bitcoins to be processed and our hashrate to be credited in the account. After you get the purchased hashrate credited into your account you have to setup the way you want your hashrate to work for you. By default it is set to 100% Auto (BTC) mode, so that you will mine various coins and get them sold for BTC and get payments directly in Bitcoins every day. You have a nice and clean interface with dials where you can set in percentages how you wish your hashrate to be distributed and in what crypto currency you want to get paid. You can for example use your hashrate to mine for Litecoin or DOGE along with a few other crypto Scrypt-based currencies such as AUR, FTC, LOT or MEC. Interestingly enough an option to get payment in Darkcoin has also just been added, meaning that what you have mined gets sold for DRK and you get the amount sent to your wallet.

Although this easy to use interface does look very nice it lacks something very important and that is some information about current profitability. This is a must have feature in order to give the users of the service some information on what could be the best option for the moment based on the current exchange rates. At least some approximates would be nice, otherwise people would have to track manually all of these currencies to see what to mine all the time in order to get the maximum profit, or the idea here is just to choose the Automatic BTC option and not care much. An estimate on profitability based on the last 24 hours of mining would be nice to have and very useful, for the purposes of our tests we have decided to start with 100% to get payment in Bitcoins, even though this may not be the most profitable option on the long term. We are also going to try out mining with the other options as well.

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The main dashboard also is clean and nicely structured giving you a brief about your current hashrate, last payment in USD as well as the total payments for the last 7 days again shown in USD. Below that you can find a chart with the daily earnings you get each day for roughly the last month. What we are missing here is an option to see the total earnings you have received since you have started using the service, something that is really useful. Another nice feature that we would want to have here is not only earnings calculated in USD, but also in BTC for example to go along the USD estimate. The service does daily payments, though so far it takes more than another half of day to get your daily payment for the previous day and this can use some improvement.

And now a bit more about the return of investment you can expect and the actual profitability of the Genesis Mining cloud mining service according to our tests. For the 1st day (actually less than 12 hours) we have received a payment of 0.45 USD or actually 0.00070292 in BTC. The second day was a bit better with a payment of roughly 0.97 USD or 0.00152639 BTC. The third and fourth days were even better with 1.30 USD or 0.00202339 BTC and 1.25 USD or 0.00197630 BTC. Considering the fact that for our 1 MHS worth of Scrypt hashrate we have paid 0.21387012 BTC by using a discount code and taking into account the earnings from the last two days as a reference we will need about three and a half months to break even. This of course will be true if the current profitability remains the same as it is now, meaning that we are going to have a decent profit for the rest of the contract period that is 12 months in total. Without the discount however and at the current standard price for 1 MHS the break even time will be close to about 5 months of the daily profitability remains the same.

So far our general impressions from the service are positive, even though it still can use some improvements in terms of functionality and a speedup in the time it takes to get your earnings would also be nice. It would also be nice to have some sort of a contact/support section for actual customers, so that you would not have to use the generic contact form on the website in case of a problem or question. We are going to continue using the service for the next year until our contract is over, so you can expect more reports about the service as we are ready to share more of our experience using it. Considering the fact that there are still not many options to go for a Scrypt cloud mining service, this one is definitely worth keeping an eye on.

For more information and to try out the Genesis Mining Scrypt could mining service yourself…

cointerramining-logo

CoinTerra, a company making Bitcoin ASIC miners, has announced their new service for cloud mining as an alternative to the mining hardware they are making and selling to customers. With available plans ranging from 200 GHS to over 1 PHS, CoinTerra certainly is making some bold claims, especially adding the fact that they promise immediate deployment of the purchased hardware. The interesting thing here is that this is the first hardware manufacturer of ASIC devices to launch their own data center and offer cloud mining services with their own hardware. Other ASIC makers such as Zeus and KnC have also announced their plans, however they have not yet launched similar services offering users the ability to purchase hashrate directly from them.

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In theory purchasing cloud mining hashrate directly from the hardware manufacturer should provide users with the best possible prices, however that may not always be true. A real world example shows that with the lowest available contact for 200 GHS of hashrate currently being sold for $999 USD you will be paying about 0.0115 BTC per GHS for 1 year contract this is not the cheapest price you can get comparing to other available services. Of course going for higher hashrate such as 2 THS will make the price per GHS more attractive at 0.0092 BTC which is still higher as compared to CexIO where you can currently get 1 GHS at about 0.0069 BTC. To achieve a similar price you would need to go for at least 1 Petahash at CoinTerra, though if you go for 2 year contracts the price you get for the second year is better and if you compare the prices to Cloud Hashing they do look much better.

cointerra-terraminer-iv

Currently the company sells their TerraMiner IV 1.6 THS Bitcoin Miner for $3499 USD or less than two times cheaper compared to the 2 THS cloud mining plan they have available for 1 year priced at $7999 USD. And there is another thing that is not very clearly defined is if there will be a maintenance fee for the cloud mining hashrate you are going to be purchasing. There is a brief mention of 5% combined fee (including maintenance) in the formula that is being used to calculate your Bitcoin earnings in the CoinTerra Mining Sales Agreement. The maintenance fee is not uncommon for cloud mining services, but with the fee subtracted from our mined earnings and these prices we can easily say that there are already better priced and proven alternatives than CoinTerraMining that not only are offering better price per GHS, but are already well established and trusted and make it much easier for the users to monitor, control and even withdraw earnings as soon as a block is mined and confirmed. In short, good job for CoinTerra to come out with such a service first among ASIC manufacturers, but the initial terms, prices and functionality they are offering does not make the service so much attractive as you would expect.

For more information about the new CoinTerraMining Bitcoin cloud mining service…

cloud-mining-services

We haven’t updated our cloud mining progress report for a while now, so we have decided to write down our latest impressions form the services we are currently testing or have tested already. And with services such as MarketsCX and Bit-Mining disappearing, creating a lot of trust issues with other and especially with newer cloud mining services it is good to give an overview based on our own experience. 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. 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 do recommend to always do some research and start small should you decide to test a new cloud mining service and be very careful, unless you are sure to be investing in an already proven and established service.

CexIO is probably 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. The service does plan to launch Litecoin cloud mining as well, but it is still not available, though they have been expanding the list of services they have such as adding Scrypt mining pools as well as introducing a trading fee on their exchange and adding future cloud mining contracts for trading. Currently the price of 1 GHS worth of Bitcoin cloud mining hashrate is around 0.0069 BTC and near the end of this month it should most likely go below 0.006 BTC judging from the current FHM trading price.

PBMining 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 and you buy a 5 years long mining contract. The service has probably the best prices per GHS for BTC cloud mining hashrate and this along with the 5 year contract makes a lot of people concerned and we were a bit concerned as well initially. However the fact that we’ve been using PiggyBack Mining for almost 3 months already and we didn’t have any problem and were always getting our weekly payouts on time we are not that concerned about them anymore… especially comparing to the bad experience we’ve had with other services that are no longer available. Currently the price per 1 GHS is 0.005 BTC per GHS and the price gets down usually every difficult increase of the Bitcoin network.

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 (3.79 PHS total hasrate). The service has own dedicated pool and you get control over the workers you have via a web-based dashboard depending on the mining contracts you have purchased. The only drawback of this service is 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 minimum of 30 GHS and they are a bit expensive at $299 or 0.69 BTC (0.023 BTC per GHS), so not easy to test the service with a very low investment before deciding if it is worth to invest more. After all everything that a miner wants to get is profit when investing in either Bitcoin mining hardware or in cloud mining services and the numbers here don’t look so good. The fact that the price for the cloud mining packages offered does not adjust with the change in difficulty does not help either.

ScryptCC is the first Litecoin cloud mining service that we’ve tried a while ago and we were very excited about it at first, but were not very satisfied by the level of support we were getting – very slow response to issues. Though things seem to have been improving the fact is that this is the only more serious Scrypt cloud mining service that remains after others such as MarketsCX and Bit-Mining have disappeared. The service is apparently using GPUs making it harder to add additional hashrate and thus the prices are mostly depending on the trading going on between users. Currently the lowest price of 1 KHS worth of Litecoin cloud mining hashrate is available for 0.000719 LTC and when we started testing it about three months ago it was pretty much double that price.

We’ve seen quite a few other new cloud mining services popping up, but no other serious enough made in terms of user functionality that is currently available. Other similar services rise some concerns, don’t have detailed mining reporting and/or trading functionality etc. Again we do recommend to always do some research and start small should you decide to test a new cloud mining service and be very careful, so that even if it disappears quickly you will not loose much!


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