Hypothetically, if a part of your algorithm has a step that depends on scrypt then you could define a message, send it to the ASIC, then get the result and continue on. There's nothing stopping people from having a 13 part algorithm that can use CPUs, GPUs, and ASICs in some combination.


Having a Java based wallet running in a browser is also possible, but you might as well say "TURN ME INTO A BOT NET NODE PLZ!". Most browsers have java execution turned off by default.

That's not even close to being profitable. Why the hell would anyone pay you to lose money? 

Scammers make money too. That doesn't mean they have a legit business model.

It's not really that hard to think about. Hardware, power, cooling, space. Rapidly increasing difficulty. Rapidly depreciating hardware value. After a year it will cost more to run and maintain the equipment than you can earn from mining (if they even have the equipment), and that's assuming bitcoin doesn't continue to fall in value. And yet they're selling 5 year contracts not only below hardware cost but also below operating cost.

It doesn't take a Ph.D in economics to figure this one out.

Now add in the fact that they're mixing the coins. Rather odd. Why would they want to obscure the source of the coin? The security excuse doesn't hold water, but mixing coins sure produces a nice cover for whatever you're doing on the back end if it would be "inconvenient" for someone to find out.

Too me, this has the signs of a ponzi. If these guys are still around in a year I might reconsider.

Because their business model seems to be financially implausible. Because their behavior is similar to a Ponzi.

Too many red flags for my tastes.

This has always been true. In any mining rush those those that made the most money weren't the miners. It was the people selling the pick axes.

You're glossing over a whole lot of issues that will definitely NOT get you .012 BTC.

First, let's start with multipools. They all use variations on an algorithm to mine the most profitable coin. When that BigAssMiningPool(tm) suddenly starts slamming the coin you'r mining, the difficulty jumps significantly. Suddenly, that .012BTC coins has become a .005BTC coin. To avoid that, you'd want to mine coins that aren't in these pools. But therein lies other problems.

Aside from pool induced variability, there is also exchange variability and liquidity. Most of these coins make penny stocks look stable by comparison. Coins with low volumes can have massive swings in price. Low volume coins also mean you can put a sell order out there and have it sit for days (or longer) without filling. Due to the this variability, just because a coin is profitable to mine now doesn't mean it will be five minutes from now, and with all the anti-pool hopping logic out there you can't make anything switching between coins at that pace.

So that leaves you with the multipools or mining single major coins to try and earn a consistent profit. In both circumstances you won't even come close to earning back what you paid for the rig, and even if you could it's still more profitable to just buy the coins directly.

The rig prices would have to be much lower for a renter to make a profit. Either that or they have to e incredibly lucky. Even a basic statistical analysis based on profitability on CoinWarz shows that any renter at those prices is guaranteed to lose money.

That should be raising big red flags by itself.

What is their business model? How do they profit? If they're selling below market with a depreciating asset against an unstable commodity, how are they going to make money? They have to pay for space. They have to pay for cooling. They have to pay for power. They have to pay for hardware. They have to pay for maintenance. Where's is that money going to come from? There's no fees as far as I can tell; just the price for the contracts. That's not enough to cover operating costs. Unless they're taking a not-insignifcant cut of the profits off the top, this is a Ponzi scheme. If they are taking their cut off the top, then you will very likely never see a profit.

If something is too good to be true, then it probably is.

Math. It's not just for pissing off high school freshmen. Cloud mining is pretty much a guaranteed loss. Using the calculator on cex.io:

50 Ghs = .56 BTC

BTC is increasing in difficulty approximately 40% per month. Including their maintenance and pool fees you will earn .31 BTC before you actually start losing money (your monthly profit goes negative).

.31 BTC - .56 BTC = -.25 BTC

So you'd need to be able to sell your hashing power back for at least .25 BTC just to be able to break even. In 7 months you'll be lucky to find any takers at that price, especially with the new ASICS coming out.

Scrypt.cc and similar sites are the only way you have a chance at making a profit through cloud services, but that has more to do with trading than mining.

Anything that locks you in for contract is a guaranteed loss. Renting rigs is also a loss (their prices never drop low enough to justify them).

Cloud mining and rig renters prey on people who can't do math. A simple "back-of-the-envelope" calculation can show that. I chose to write a Monte Carlo simulator using data from sites like CoinWarz to figure out at what price point things like rig rentals and cloud mining make a guaranteed profit for the end user. The short answer: It doesn't. In almost every case it's better to either buy you're own equipment or just outright buy the coins you want and hold them.

Places like scrypt.cc and similar sites CAN make you a profit if you play your cards right, but that has less to do with actual mining than trading.

The current price for a 1.3 MHs contract is .008. Punching that into CoinWarz and factoring in fees, l'm not really seeing how this is a profitable option.

You're right. If the price were .005 then renters could make a small profit.

However, the stats page would lead me to seriously question the "most of our renters make money" claim. For example, today the trailing average all day has been hovering around .007 BTC/Mhs/day while the most profitable coins have been around .006 with a top ten average around the mid .005's. Adding in leasing fees and such make the gap bigger. Then there's the pool fees, withdrawal fees, etc. on top of that. The only way for a renter to profit would be to "mine and hold" hoping for the coin value to increase. But honestly, if that's their intention then buying the coins instead of mining them would be much more profitable since they wouldn't be sacrificing up to a third of their capital before getting their coins.

Don't get me wrong. I like the concept of renting rigs. I think it provides a much needed service. But so far I haven't seen any prices for leasing a rig that would profitable to the renter. Maybe I'm just catching the stats page at the wrong times of the day or something.

You're basically making things up. Unless you can personally audit the transactions you have no proof one way or the other whether ANY pool is scamming you. Just because they throw up numbers on a web page does not mean those numbers have anything to do with reality. There's no organization like the SEC or FDIC who comes through and audits the books to make sure everyone is playing nice.

You can make a profit. For example, lets say you buy 24 hours on a 3 MHs scrypt rig at the current lowest rate (0.0063/MH/s/day). That will cost you about .02 BTC. However, if you head over to one of the profitability calculators you'll see that the current most profitable coins will get you .03+ BTC per day with that hashrate.

Of course, that isn't a guaranteed. Fees, price swings, and numerous other factors can eat into that profitability margin. There's always a chance that a pool will have bad luck or underperform. The rig operator and LeaseRigs make a guaranteed profit (the BTC you pay) while you do not have any such guarantees. You COULD make a profit but that doesn't mean you will. There's nothing stopping you from shooting yourself in the foot by using the rigs you rent inefficiently.

No offense, but at your prices you either haven't checked the profitability statistics in about 2 years or your trying to scam people who don't know any better.

You have a 10,000 KHS 24-hour contract for $113. However, checking the latest 24-hour coin profitability statistics, the best you can hope to make with such a contract is between $30-$40. Not exactly what one could consider a smart investment. In comparison, Scyptery has a similar 10,000KHS contract for about $45. It's still not profitable based on the latest profitability statistics, but it's much closer to reality.

Your "empty queue" prices would be decent, but there doesn't appear to be any sort of guaranteed minimum hashrate. In other words, it seems like someone could pay you $16 for 48 hours but end up getting 0 KHS if the queues are no longer "empty". That seems like a bit of a crapshoot there.

If you're using cgminer, use --benchmark to see how well the unit is performing. This hashes the same work unit over and over again while recording stats (hashrate, errors, etc.). It's probably the most objective measure you can get.

You keep saying that. However so far the reports from the modified miners don't back that up.

I can overclock my unmodified miner to get 500 kh/s, but that doesn't mean I'm getting 500 kh/s worth of completed work. Due to rejects/HW errors I'd be getting a lot less than that. You posted a screenshot showing 500kh/s but you had 429 HW errors over the course of about two days. For the same period of time, I have 9 HW errors. Those HW errors hurt and lower your effective hashrate.

It doesn't matter what hashrate your miner is reporting. What matters is how much work the pool sees you are doing. If, as we've seen, your miner is reporting 450 kh/s but the pool is reporting a 24 hour average of 350 kh/s then something is off.

We need OBJECTIVE tests to verify how effective the mods are. Testing shouldn't be run against pools or solomining anyway. There's too much variance. A real test would be run against test blocks. Remove the pools and coins from it entirely. Send the same workunit over and over again. Take the stats from that and calculate the effective hashrate. I think cgminer has a test mode that does something like this.

That isn't what the results indicate so far. If you're running at 1000 MHz, you should be hashing at around 420 kh/s. The stats so far indicate that even with no errors the performance isn't noticeably better than an unmodified unit. There could be a number of reasons for that.

That being said, you can't make the claim that there are no other issues when overclocking without knowing how every part of the system works. If any part of the system is being saturated or starved, increasing chip speed isn't going to help (and may even make things worse depending on the software/firmware/architecture).

Again, hashrate does NOT equal performance. Hashrate is a measure of how fast the chips are hashing, not how much work is actually being done. That's why you need to look at the whole system when you're trying to improve performance. More hashing power is pointless if the problem is actually IO, for example.

If after another 24 hours elapse and the performance is still about the same, then other parts of the system may need to be investigated for potential bottlenecks.

Same here. My unmodified miner gets poolside results of anywhere from 250-500 kh/s. Using the 500 kh/s spike to make any claims doesn't make a lot of sense. My average rate is somewhere around 360-370.

As has been said many times in this thread, a faster hashrate does not necessarily mean better overall performance. The rest of the miner needs to be taken into account. I can think of several issues off the top of my head that would prevent improved performance (and even worse performance) with overclocking. Even the firmware could become an issue (ever played an old DOS game that didn't have an FPS limiter on a modern machine?).

I'm waiting to see what the numbers look like after another 24 hours.