I’ve only been the owner of a Hashlet from GAWMiners / ZenCloud for less than a week and I’m liking what I’m seeing thus far. My initial investment was a mere 15.99 USD for a 1MH/s Hashlet and honestly, the purchase itself was the most rocky situation. Seems with the launch of the Hashlets, GAWMiners were able to inadvertently crash Shopify. I believe that’s the reason that my credit card company felt my purchase may be fraudulent and I had to jump through the fraud protection hoops before being able to purchase. I understand that may scare a lot of folks off, but this was for the science! Also, that’s why I use a credit card online and not a debit card 😉
After purchasing my Hashlet from GAWMiners, I received an email with my redemption code and a link to ZenCloud / ZenMiner. I set up my account, redeemed my code and was able to set up my Hashlet all within a few minutes. The ZenCloud site is very clean and professional and easy to use. They also offer two-factor authentication which I feel is an absolute must have feature when dealing with cryptocurrency, or anything of any importance.
Setup was a breeze, you pick whether you want to mine Altcoin (Scrypt) or Bitcoin (SHA-256) and you select your pool. ZenPool is provided by GAWMiners and is advertised as “the world’s most profitable poll” and has zero pool fees. There are other pool options and you can switch at any time. After going through the options, ZenPool was definitely paying more than the rest by like a third. Kind of a no brainer. I opted for mining Altcoins as I figured the difficulty would be lower than attempting to mine BTC directly. Also, the ZenPool is currently only for Altcoin.
At this point all I had to do was wait. I’ll be up front about this, I was quite skeptical that this was anything less than a ponzi scheme and I would probably not see any earnings or at best only earning enough to cover maintenance fees. To my surprise, the next day when I logged in, I had earned a very tiny bit, 0.00004107 BTC to be exact. I was amazed, especially considering that I set the Hashlet up pretty late in the day, that payout was a prorated partial payment and I was not hit with any maintenance fees for the partial day. The next few days the payouts grew to an average of 0.00067 BTC per day. With the fluctuating BTC prices, the payouts fluctuate as well. The recent drop in BTC value hasn’t helped matters, but the payouts are still pretty solid.
Fees shorty, fees! After the inital 15.99$ investment, there is an 0.08 USD maintenance fee per 1MH you have in your account. If you have 1MH it’s 8 cents, 15MH it’s a buck twenty, et cetera. Because the fee is in USD and not BTC your fees will go up as BTC falls. Fees are taken directly from your BTC balance so it’s not like you’re paying out of pocket, just out of your earnings. It has been published that the maintenance fee should go down over time, by how much, I’m unsure.
In theory, if the price of Bitcoin were to fall low enough then your daily maintenance fees would exceed your earnings. Thus far that hasn’t been the case and in 3 full days of mining I have had a profit of around 0.0005 per day. If the BTC price were to remain at 500$, it would take roughly 64 days to break even on the initial investment. Not that bad in my opinion, especially considering the rising difficulty of mining, the cost of entry on dedicated hardware and the cost to power said equipment.
Since I’ve purchased my Hashlet, the ZenCloud site / service has received a few updates. Most notable is the ability to buy Hashlets directly from the site with a credit card before it was just with BTC and you would have to go back to the GAWMiners site to buy another Hashlet with a credit card. You can also bankroll your earnings into buying additional Hashlets automatically when your BTC balance reaches the price of the Hashlet you have set up to automatically buy. One of my favorite new features even though I only have a single Hashlet is the ability to combine the processing power of your Hashlets by stacking them up. Instead of investing in the 5MH Hashlet, you can buy 1MH Hashlets over time and simply stack them to combine their computing power. If you do the math, this actually saves you a few pennies in the long run.
It hasn’t happened yet, but eventually the Hashlets will be able to mine other cryptocurrencies directly instead of converting to BTC. If I had to speculate that could easily lend itself to ZenCloud becoming a full fledged exchange in the future.
So do I think GAWMiners Hashlets are worth it? I think so, although I wouldn’t go sinking my life savings into it. It’s been a fun way for me to earn some satoshis without any effort or much of an initial investment. At the moment I’m confident that I should be able to break even on my investment and reach profitability but the volatility of the BTC prices right now means it may end up taking longer than expected (or shorter if there’s a huge rally ;). Will this remain the case in the future? Hard to say, I’m just glad to be on the ground floor of this service.
Got 15.99 or more laying around and want to get into cloud mining of Bitcoins? Did you think this article was super informative and you want to help me out? If so, I’m asking – pretty please – that you sign up using my referral link. Also, feel free to comment on your experience below!
Amendment 8/31 The price per Hashlet has fluctuated quite a bit (supply and demand) and went from 15.99$ to 19.99$ all the way up to 24.99$ all in the last week. The pricing has since changed based on which pool you want to mine for and the ZenPool still has the best payout. The price per MH/s Hashlet for the ZenPool is currently 21.95$. They also offer miners for lower paying pools for as low as 16.95$ as well as a more advanced Hashlet for 39.99$.
