Still the best choice
for cloud mining
You may already know about cloud mining and what the cryptocurrency community thinks of it, and more importantly, you may know about the relatively recent and very severe security breach NiceHash suffered, which could understandably deter you from trying it out. At the same time, your budget might be limited to get into mining so you’re not sure about where to go other than a pool.
To help you, this short review will tell you the essential things you should know about NiceHash. Whether you’re a new user or an experienced doesn’t matter, you might learn a thing or two by reading this.
How exactly does it work?
It might seem confusing at first but NiceHash is actually pretty simple. To make it easier, we’ll show you how the marketplace works:
The hashing power buyers, who select the coin they’re looking to mine, a pool compatible with the NiceHash mining software and put up the price they’re willing to pay for the hashing power they’re seeking. After the offer is placed in the marketplace, the buyer only has to wait for the order to be fulfilled by miners that are running the NiceHash miner software on their rigs. After this order is fulfilled, the buyer gets the coin he was seeking from the pool.
Then you have the sellers, which includes anyone that’s mining with the NiceHash miner software. This is an automated process where the miner connects to both the NiceHash server and the buyer’s order. Once the miner connects to a specific order, its hashing power goes towards the pool that the buyer wants to mine from. This means that miners will be mining all kinds of altcoins, but the coin rewarded from submitting a valid share will always be bitcoins. This entire process is automated at the press of a button, so the neither the buyer nor the seller requires a lot of knowledge about cryptocurrency mining to join.
As you might expect for a service so intuitive and easy to use, NiceHash will be taking a small fee from both parties once each transaction in the marketplace is done.
What does the community think of it?
The overall consensus on NiceHash is positive, which is fairly surprising when you consider the fact that most of the crypto community dislikes cloud mining. The reason for this level of positive reception can be attributed to several reasons, with the main one being that NiceHash isn’t strictly a cloud mining platform, you don’t have to buy hashing power, and you can just sell yours and get rewarded on a relatively constant basis. More importantly, it’s extremely easy to use, so it’s a great entry point for newbies getting into mining.
About the security breach
Even if you’re not too much into cryptocurrency just yet, it’s very likely that you’ve heard about the security breach that NiceHash suffered on the 6th of December last year. On that day, NiceHash was allegedly hacked through a spear phishing attack, with the end result being £45 million worth (at the time of the attack) of bitcoin stolen and Marko Kobal, CEO of NiceHash resigning.
As it was previously mentioned, it’s understandable if this event made you stay away from NiceHash, a lot of money was lost after all. But, you should also know that NiceHash recovered from this extremely quickly and improved their security measures, which shows commitment. This is an important thing to remark about because businesses related to crypto don’t usually recover from losses like this, and their commitment didn’t come without rewards, as the NiceHash user base regained traction quite quickly after the site went up again.
What about pricing?
If you’re a seller, there’s no price attached to it. You can freely use the NiceHash miner without having to sign up for an account. You just associate your BTC wallet with the NiceHash miners and just wait for your rewards.
If you’re a buyer however, registration is understandably required so that you can freely post your offers in the marketplace. Buyers have the following altcoins to choose from when renting hashing power:
- Bitcoin (pricing starts at £32.97)
- Ethereum (pricing starts at £32.97)
- ZCash (pricing starts at £32.97)
As you can see, pricing isn’t different in any of these because your order price will be on BTC, and all offers start at 0.005BTC. The more hashing power you want, the more you’ll have to pay.
Note: as you may know, the crypto market is very volatile, so the prices shown are just approximates. Keep up to date with prices to have a more accurate number.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- It’s been active for the last 4 years with only one major issue ever happening (the attack).
- Registration is optional.
- Extremely easy to set up and use.
- The marketplace is active at all times.
- NiceHash provides you with a wallet from which you can send the funds to you Coinbase account or another BTC address.
- The prices for renting hashing power are reasonable.
- As a buyer you can cancel at any time, with no fees attached.
- You only pay for valid shares.
- You can keep track of your order with real time statistics.
Cons
- The Security breach damaged its reputation, even if temporarily, which scared away a lot of newcomers.
- Like any cloud mining platform, profiting from renting hashing power isn’t exactly guaranteed.
- Miners only get paid in bitcoin, which might be a con to some people.
To sum things up
Overall, there aren’t really many negatives when talking about NiceHash. It has proven to be a reliable mining platform and marketplace and it’s only getting better.
About NiceHash
Funded by Marko Kobal and Matjaž Škorjanc back in 2014, NiceHash is one of the biggest, if not the biggest cloud mining marketplace around. The reason it is a marketplace is because NiceHash can’t be considered a strict or traditional cloud mining platform since it works differently. Essentially, NiceHash provides you with free mining software which you can use with your rig or mining farm, and the reason you get paid is because of the hashing power you’re providing to the marketplace rather than the mining operation itself; you do mine in a pool, but the rewards come from another source (the buyer) at a very decent and constant rate.
The cloud mining label of NiceHash comes from its marketplace, where you can “buy” (rent) hashing power for a specific amount of time to obtain high hash rates without even owning a rig. Now, whether it is worth it to rent hashing power or not, you’ll usually get mixed responses, so ideally you should try it out by yourself.
