Show HN: Coinwell - the easiest way to mine litecoins | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Coinwell - the easiest way to mine litecoins

coinwell.net

13 pointstheanirudh31 comments

Logically, this must generate less income than it costs to run, otherwise the people running it would make more money mining Litecoins themselves rather than selling the service to mine them.

We are also mining ourselves and now we want to grow more. In order to mine more and reduce our costs, we need users. It becomes cheaper to buy more hardware etc., hence we are providing this as a service.

In a gold rush, it's always best to be the one selling the shovels.

Lets quickly do the math on this.

At the time of writing, Litecoin is at $23.50 and Bitstamp is showing Bitcoin at $821.

The cost of the lowest service is 0.75BTC pa, which works out to be $615.75 per year.

615.75/23.50 = 26.2021276596

At a rate of 0.5 MH/s, we're looking at 0.12406948 LTC a day[1] at the current network difficulty.

So, to mine 26.2021276596 LTC, it would take us 211.1891470779115 days. That came out a lot quicker than I thought it would, but still an exorbitant amount of time.

LTC is not my interest or strong point, so if there are any errors, please let me know so I can correct them.

[1] https://www.litecoinpool.org/calc?hashrate=500&difficulty=38...

Don't forget that the difficulty [1] will increase over time. By using the calculator [2] with only a 5% increase, zero electricity costs etc. we don't see any return at all.

[1] http://bitcoinwisdom.com/litecoin/difficulty

[2] http://bitcoinwisdom.com/litecoin/calculator

The difficulty will increase, but the price may increase.

I remember a year or two ago I was calculating all my BTC mining efforts on its value being under $30. Some efforts were break-even at sub-$30 exchange rates, but now in retrospect were well worth it.

But the big term is may, as it also may decrease.

Ouch. Thanks for the information.

In addition, that second link helps us work out what equivalent hardware at home we could use to accomplish a similar (non)return. Purchasing an AMD HD7970 graphics card, with a hash rate of 0.7MH/s, and mining with that could arguably be cheaper in the long run

The problem comes when you start factoring electricity and so on. In my calculation the difference is just too little. Plus you have the advantage of not investing time into it.

Again this is assuming the price of LTC also does not increase. That is unlikely if the difficulty increases.

That's true. It would start being worthwhile at around 70$ (maximum price was iirc ~48$ recently). It may be very well possible to get an return especially if you believe in litecoin (328 times increase in 2013 [1])

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/01/13/a-100-wor...

This is all assuming that litecoin does not go up in trading at all. If assuming litecoin goes to 40 - 60 USD which it was just Dec 2013, source http://coinmarketcap.com/xrp_180.html then the recovery time will be between 50 to 100 days.

Only do this if you believe in litecoins

Yes, that is true. My post was assuming the price of LTC did not change, although over the past 2 weeks it hasn't ventured very far north of of $24 or even very far south $22.

http://www.ltc-charts.com/period-charts.php?period=2-weeks&r...

If the price goes up you would have been better off just keeping your money in litecoin to begin with. There's no way you can win with this, that's why they're selling it.

The interesting thing is that India has one of lowest costs for electricity.

Exactly, thats why we are able to be so cheap

Maybe a referral program like CEX will help Coinwell out

"We are a company registered in India." -- No, thank you. Economic and political stability required.

India is not as economically and politically unstable as you think - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_India

Think about it, all the largest companies like IBM, Microsoft, Google, NetApp have huge campuses in India if it was unstable why would they be there?

A large company can absorb a lot more risk than an individual, or really any entity smaller than itself.

In fact, that attribute - the ability to absorb risk (and failure) is the reason why a corporation is a useful structure in the first place - nobody wants to take on a billion dollars in credit personally.

True, however large corporations take large risks also. When you invest in services like this its around 1000 USD. Imagine when companies are willing to take upward of 2 billion USD risk they won't do that unless they are sure.

I understand this. They are large companies, the comparison is uneven. They are in India, because there is an advantage for them to be. Nothing else.

How is that not a fair comparison... All companies will exist where "there is an advantage" right. But if there was the severe disadvantage of being in India like political and economic instability nobody would like to be there

Let's assume I invest on this. What will happen if, after accumulating a nice amount of coins, one day the URL ceases to exist, and no one is to be found? What provisions do the Indian government have in place to help me recover my investment?

I know the workings on the countries I have some type of investment (Europe and North America). They are mature, known to work well for ages. Nothing I know about India, or Africa, or former Soviet Republics, or Middle East, or some countries un South America and Asia. I simply don't trust, because if I lose, I lose most of what I own. I have lots to lose, because what I would lose is all I have. I require confidence.

India has very strict laws about corporate fraud. If you do find that the URL ceases to exist you can put a case on the company with the LLPIN mentioned, even the name is enough. That will cause India to cease the funds and arrest all directors and put them on bail.

Its not that easy to do fraud in India and run away. India is not South Africa, Soviet Union or Middle East. The GDP of India is 1.84 trillion USD. Many companies want to invest in India, especially companies like Walmart, Starbucks and so on.

India has car assembly units of Toyota, Nissan, Renault, Honda, Maruti, Huyndai and many more each costing about 1 billion USD. That type of investment does not come if your country allows easy corporate fraud.

Oh fuck off!

I am just writing what many will think but dare to write.

1.5mh/s is tiny.

1.5 MH/s is pretty fast in Litecoin mining, and we are working towards getting more capacity. From our initial estimate we found that you can earn upwards of $50 a week

are you running any promos? :P

Thanks for the suggestions, we will consider adding a referral program. Also what do you mean by promos? like a discount on contracts?

promos for early users, to get the word out, etc. so yes, discounts.

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