I wanted to post an update to some of my free mining experiment that I started a week ago. It focused around a couple of the cloud mining websites that offer free mining power to new user. All these sites are trying to encourage the new user to deposit money or coins into their system to enhance GHS and increase rates of return. The services that I explored were Eobot, Ilivon, Bit-Fire and Sierra Hash.
Right off the bat, Sierra Hash is no more so there is no reason to even discuss them. So they either fell into one of these two scenarios. They were either a scam to start with, trying to grab people's investments are run or they fell victim to the fact that giving away mining power can be disastrous if there are no people actually investing in to the platform to pay for hardware and software costs. I am not going to speculate, because I don't know.
My Eobot account is still humming, not growing at any great rate but it is alive. I am claiming the faucet once a day and building mining power slowly. I have not invested any money or coins into the platform since the very beginning when I was dumping Dogecoin from my Coin Pot account into it. This site has pretty high fees to exchange coins so placing coins into their system causes a lot of waste. Still, it is free and it has been around for a while so as far as it goes for a free site, it is pretty good. I am not close to getting any pay out, but again I am going for a long game on these sites.
Ilivon is still operational. I don't know how sustainable it is, but they due have a faucet so they do have an income stream that is external from the rental of GHS. There GHS is super cheap in price so that could either be great or a sign that it two good to be true. Ultimately, I worry about sustainability of this service because there is no real investment required other than time claiming the faucet rewards. I will keep chugging away at this one, it will take some maintenance like Eobot to make the free service profitable.
Bit-Fire was the other service I tried out. This one seems like they have a more sustainable model. The reason I say this is that they have a limit on there free service, so to continue mining and get a pay out, I would have to put skin in the game to get this site to pay. Their GHS rental rates are closer to the going rate for GHS rental which doesn't mean much, but it does give you a sense that they are actually renting capacity from someone else or have their own equipment.
Maybe the best lesson so far that I have learned is that nothing is free. Now I am not dumb and I know that everything costs something. I cannot expect to make a profit off of a website just because I created an account. We need to be smart and research what we are getting into, these sites are using this free GHS to get us in the door and hopefully invest into more GHS to increase payment time. If you want to actually buy cloud mining power, please do the research into the companies that you are looking at. Also, understand there are not sure things, we can look no further than the dumpster fire that is Nicehash which was until last week one of the top providers of cloud mining contracts.
There are so many websites for cloud mining that I am skeptical unless proven otherwise. I am getting away from those and spending more time on finding best faucets and learning about new coins on bitcointalk. There are new coins everyday and when you get in early some of them are dirt cheap and some even free. Although even on bitcointalk there are some coins that are scams but there will be many others on the forum well experience to be able to spot scams. No one is perfect and so always have your doubts before investing. I mostly spend my time but no real money earning coins. That way if anything goes wrong I am not financially affected. Think of it as a hobby instead of a source of income.
I think that is the best way to do it especially for new people entering the world. There is so much noise out there and so many scams. I think it best to just get the free stuff and learn as we go.
I'm doing a threat assessment of a handful of mining sites as well as a couple "faucet" sites. Once everything is done (I have 3 left), I will post a whole tome of findings.
I look forward to reading what you find. I have using Coin Pot based faucets a lot and have started using Faucet Hub based faucets as well. Faucet Hub has far more faucets available but it comes with some limitations and withdraw limits. If Faucet Hub had the currency exchanging ability that Coin Pot has, I would be really into them.
Faucethub? Tell me more. I may do a threat assessment on them, too.
Faucethub.io is a micro wallet but they have access to many much in the way of available faucets. Can also browser mine from their site and access other browser miners that utilize coin-hive script. Good site to gain access to more coins including the Proof of Stake coins that are the new rage. Using this site and their faucets, one could achieve the claiming results that I suggested in my “Faucet Math” post a couple days ago.
I agree faucethub is better than coinpot. They have a leveling program that gets you more rewards and daily rains. I just do not have enough time to be on that site and rarely collect faucets at all. If I did not work a full time job faucethub would be my homepage everyday.
I think I will put out a lot of my favorite faucets for faucet hub next week. There are a couple that pay pretty well that have short time between claims.
Great idea. I think it will be a useful post as not many people have went through all of faucethub's faucets and find which are the most rewarding. Can not wait to read it. Thanks.
Coin Hive is considered malware by a lot of security experts. Mainly due to the fact that the website admin can control how much processing power the users of their site provide, and not the end user. It's the second most blocked url by Malwarebytes since September of this year.
I don't have a huge problem with sites that use Coin Hive as long as they are honest about it. I am not a huge fan of sites that use it in the background and have ads because of the double dipping they are doing. The site that I use for Coin Hive mining is faucet-mining.club. The pay outs are not great but there are no ads and the payouts are every minute so it helps to quickly level up in Faucet Hub.
The problem is that too many are not transparent about it. Actually, UFC got in some hot water for coinhive mining during a live fight last november.
https://www.coindesk.com/mixed-mining-arts-ufc-website-removes-coinhive-cryptocurrency-code/