Great GUI,
not-so-great Hash rates

If you’re new to mining you might’ve seen MinerGate being mentioned alongside NiceHash as an entry point for newbies. After all, MinerGate provides easy to use software so that you can start mining almost immediately and a readily available set of altcoin and bitcoin pools, with the nice addition of being able to mine two coins simultaneously without decreasing the hash rates of the main coin. However, if you dig deeper into it, you might find that the word around MinerGate isn’t exactly fully positive, which is why we’re doing this short review.

On the following sections we’ll be covering everything you need to know regarding MinerGate, to hopefully inform you and help you better evaluate your options.
So, let’s get started.

What does MinerGate offer?

MinerGate offers a fairly robust set of features that both newcomers and experienced users can benefit from, such as:

  • Two types of mining software. One with a Graphical Interface and a console one for experienced users that are used to that. Additionally, users that want more control can use an administrator version of the mining software that lets them launch it on several computers and lets it work in the background.
  • A blockchain explorer, which allows users to see confirmed and unconfirmed transactions, all in real time.
  • Charts that allow you to see the volume of coins currently in circulation, the current difficulty of each, their block rewards and the network’s hashrate.
  • The ability to directly transfer your rewards to an exchange (Changelly).
  • A cloud mining service.
  • A calculator which allows you to see hourly, daily or weekly profits for whatever coin or coins you want to mine.
  • Pool statistics.
  • A smart mining algorithm that automatically switches you to the most profitable coin at the moment in order to maximize profits. Note that this is an optional feature, and you can freely turn it on or off at any time.
  • 2 Factor Authentication for increased security.
  • The ability to manually set network fees.
  • 24/7 customer support.
  • An affiliate program that goes up to 0.75% of the referrer’s profit.

What does the community think of it?

If you look around several crypto related forums you’ll find that the overall reception to MinerGate is kind of a mixed bag. You can attribute this to several reasons, but the biggest problem I found was that it was constantly compared to NiceHash, which is understandable because both are extremely accessible.

Although understandable, this comparison is rather unfair because NiceHash works differently to MinerGate. NiceHash rewards you on the basis of selling your hashing power rather than the mining you’re doing, while MinerGate is a mining pool that also provides their own mining software. Despite the comparison however, the main complaint that people have about MinerGate is actually a fair one: Hash rates and block rewards seem to be lower than in other pools, effectively resulting in lower profits than what you’d get on other pools with the exact same rig.

Additionally, the community doesn’t particularly like MinerGate’s lack of transparency. Their software is closed source, and it is speculated that they were involved in the creation of Bytecoin, which was one of the biggest pre mines in cryptocurrency history so far, and although that isn’t something illegal, it’s something that the crypto community is wary of after experiencing the early years of cryptocurrency.

Are there any pool fees?

The MinerGate pool has no entry fees, but does have small fees taken from each reward. Their cloud mining service however does have a price. Currently, you can only cloud mine BTC and XMR, with ETH coming soon.
  • BTC mining starts at £0.0048 a day for 20 GH/s and goes all the way up to £236 a day for 1000000.0000 GH/s.
  • XMR mining starts at £0.0049 a day for 11 H/s and goes up to £60 a day for 126000 H/s.

Pros & Cons

Like it or not, MinerGate definitely does some things right, and naturally some things wrong too. Whether the cons outweigh the pros here is essentially up to you.

Pros

  1. Great user friendly graphical interface.
  2. Supports multiple languages.
  3. A respectable number of different altcoins available to mine.
  4. The smart mining algorithm is great for those who don’t want to keep up with prices.
  5. Two different payment models available.

Cons

  1. The hashrates are lower than they should be regardless of your rig, which results in lower payouts. You can confirm this by multiple reports of users experiencing the same thing.
  2. The cloud mining service they offer is vastly inferior when compared to a dedicated cloud mining service like Genesis Mining.

To sum things up

Overall, MinerGate seems to have a lot of positives, but the fact that hash rates and rewards are reduced for an unexplained reason severely outweigh them when you can find a program as good and easy to use as NiceHash. Sure, they work differently, but if your focus is mining for profits, look somewhere else, because MinerGate will probably disappoint you. If you feel confident enough, look into joining a good pool and using management software such as Awesome Miner, which we have a review of available, so check that out.

About MinerGate

MinerGate is one of the largest and oldest mining services around. It was funded in the same year NiceHash was funded, on the 24th of March of 2014. It’s known for being the first mining pool that was compatible with Cryptonote based currencies and bitcoin. As of today, MinerGate allows you to mine.

  • Aeoncoin (AEON)
  • Bitcoin (BTC)
  • Bitcoin Gold (BTG)
  • Bytecoin (BCN)
  • DashCoin (DSH)
  • DigitalNote (XDN)
  • Ethereum (ETH)
  • Ethereum Classic (ETC)
  • Fantomcoin (FCN)
  • Infinium-8 (INF-8)
  • Litecoin (LTC)
  • Monero (XMR)
  • MonetaVerde (MCN)
  • Quazarcoin (QCN)
  • Zcash (ZEC)

MinerGate’s payment models are PPS (Pay per Share) and PPLNS (Pay per Last N Shares).

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