Hashflare, One of the Largest Cloud Bitcoin Mining Companies, Abruptly Disables SHA-256 Mining Contracts, Leaving Customers Furious (twitter.com) 84
Hashflare, one of the largest bitcoin mining companies, said on Friday it is disabling its SHA-256 hardware and also discontinuing support for mining services on the active SHA-256 contracts. The move comes as Hashflare continues to struggle with generating revenues, the company said, putting the blame on market fluctuations. In an email to active customers, the company added: For over a month our users encountered a situation when the payouts were lower than the maintenance fees, resulting in zero accruals to the balance. As of 18.07.2018, the payouts were lower than maintenance for 28 consecutive days. BTC mining continues being unprofitable, in light of which we would like to inform you that on 18.07.2018 (July 18) we were forced to start disabling SHA hardware and today, on 20.07.2018 (July 20), stop the mining service of active SHA-256 contracts in accordance with clause 5.5 of our Terms of Service, which are required to be accepted when creating a purchase and are the basis of concluding the contract. We expect that the cryptocurrency market situation will stabilize in the nearest future and we will be able to offer our users new advantageous solutions. Customers are understandably furious.
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Then perhaps you should read it instead of showing that you have no idea what it says? It's not even a long clause, and quite clearly spells out what are the conditions for acting the way they did, and they are quite clearly defined.
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Had . Had is the word you're looking for.
You commented on this thread because you use(d) Hashflare.
Google the word, Had .
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Your ignorance is showing.
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Nobody believes you.
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He didn't say he had 1000 bitcoins. 1000 'coins', could be pennies, could be some worthless cryptocoin, could be 1,000,000 zimbabwe dollar or worthless Venezuelan commie coins..
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In the realm of crypto-currency.. At the rate that the volatility value is falling, it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to cash out while there is still a profit. Just like most markets, profits can always take a hard dip with little to no profit recovery.
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Right, Sell. .... ehrrrr ... To whom?
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$7300 each on the open market?
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I mined a little over 10 BTC around 5 years ago.
When the price jumped to $100 I sold 10 and got $1000 and reported it as income on my taxes. It felt great.
I got bored, threw the change I had away at some Bitcoin gambling site, and stopped mining.
Then the damn things went to $1000 per coin and I wished I had waited to sell and wished I hadn't stopped mining. I looked into mining again, but my hardware was no longer profitable and I didn't expect it to go past $1000.
Then the damn things kept going up and up
To whom it may concern... (Score:4, Insightful)
ostensibly (Score:2)
Ostensibly means:
apparently or purportedly, but perhaps not actually.
Which doesn't exactly make sense when directly linking to people complaining
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Oh wow, the editors actually read your comment and fixed the summary...
Are pigs flying?
"Ostensibly" furious? (Score:1)
Wow, that's a big word. But I'm sure you're right, the customers are probably just faking it.
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They're nerds. Real fury ends with their heads being flushed and them hanging on a doorknob by their underwear.
This is the way it is supposed to work (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:This is the way it is supposed to work (Score:4, Funny)
Want to buy my supply of delicious vintage radium water? Good time to buy as its price will surely rise. /s
Re: This is the way it is supposed to work (Score:2)
It would hurt, but it would not fail. That's the power of a decentralized platform. Most platforms die with their corporate sponsors.
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https://support.coinbase.com/c... [coinbase.com]
Cash balances held in your Coinbase accounts belong to you - not Coinbase.
If you are a United States resident, your Coinbase USD Wallet is covered by FDIC insurance, up to a maximum of $250,000.
Even if Coinbase were to fail as a business, the funds held in the custodial bank accounts could not be claimed by Coinbase or its creditors. The funds held in those accounts would be returnable to Coinbase’s customers.
Re:This is the way it is supposed to work (Score:5, Interesting)
If it costs more to mine the BitCoin then mining will stop until the price of BitCoin rises. Once BitCoin rises to a certain level it will start mining again. Free market at work. In fact, it might be a good time to buy BitCoin now, since it price will rise.
The problem here is that at some tipping point, lack of mining operations will increase transaction times which will make BitCoin unattractive because of it lacks liquidity, taking too long to verify transactions. This could cause it's value to plummet further and mining operators to flee to more profitable work. Transaction times for BitCoin have been pretty long of late, making active investment in BitCoin *really* difficult to do quickly. Waiting an hour to see if your trade is confirmed, or paying extra fees makes it all that harder to turn profits and discourages investors.
So, this problem may just spell the end of BitCoin should we reach some tipping point...
I don't think we are at that point yet, but I'm also not sure your flashing the buy signal is advised either. Admittedly, I've never been a fan of BitCoin specifically (or crypto in general); I think it's way too volatile to make it into an "investment", BUT if you want to gamble some cash, BitCoin might be better odds than a Vegas craps table.
Re: This is the way it is supposed to work (Score:2)
We're far from the tipping point. The institutional operators have different classes of hardware. They shut down the inefficient ones, but have plenty of newer ones to handle the network until the next difficulty adjustment. The price would have to fall far and fast (even for BTC) for a mining difficulty network collapse to take hold.
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We're far from the tipping point. The institutional operators have different classes of hardware. They shut down the inefficient ones, but have plenty of newer ones to handle the network until the next difficulty adjustment. The price would have to fall far and fast (even for BTC) for a mining difficulty network collapse to take hold.
Wait, so "institutional operators" basically control the space now? What happened to that decentralization thing that was supposed to be the entire purpose of bitcoin?
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Same thing that happened to the anonymity, and freedom form regulation by government. It never actually existed.
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Bitcoin was never designed to be anonymous. It's a PUBLIC LEDGER OF TRANSACTIONS.
Which government has successfully stopped people from using Bitcoin?
Decentralization ended with ASICs (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait, so "institutional operators" basically control the space now? What happened to that decentralization thing that was supposed to be the entire purpose of bitcoin?
Decentralization ended with ASIC mining hardware displacing CPUs and GPUs. We are far removed from the point in time where ordinary users with ordinary computers were in control. For years control is centralized in *one* particular authoritarian country that is not known for a hands off approach to things. Something around 60-70% (IIRC) of the hash rate occurs in its border and is dependent upon cheap government supplied power. We've also had mining pools approach the 51% attack hazard. Something that was assumed to be "impossible" as the network grows.
The theoretical foundation of Bitcoin no longer matches reality, the risk of blockchain manipulation by government or cartel is now quite plausible.
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Wait, so "institutional operators" basically control the space now? What happened to that decentralization thing that was supposed to be the entire purpose of bitcoin?
It's still in play.
The decentralized nature of Bitcoin means that you need a large percentage of computing power to attack the network.
You need a majority of the total computing power in order to manipulate transactions (give yourself more BTC).
With a plurality, you could certainly disrupt shit for a time.
But the block chain is public. At any given point, people can look at the transactions and decide that an attack is happening, then take their ball and go home by forking the block chain. Leaving the att
Re: This is the way it is supposed to work (Score:2)
No. If you read it with your comprehension enabled this time, you will see that institutional operators help protect the network integrity.
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If every miner stopped today, they network would adjust the difficulty down, down, down, to the point where a single miner on a desktop PC could quickly process the low volume of transactions for the whole network and start farming up BTC. As transaction speed increases, volume increases, and so does the perceived value of BTC.
Whether or not Bitcoin would rebound and become as popular again after a panic is unknowable. Its decentralized and resilient nature has a lot of value, and I think it will remain h
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If every miner stopped today, Bitcoin would die. Difficulty isn't adjusted based on time, but on blocks mined. Specifically, after every 2016 blocks, the difficulty is adjusted up or down by no more than a factor of 4. With nobody mining, the difficulty is never adjuste
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Technically correct (the best kind of correct). I wasn't literally referring to all miners stopping at once, but a large, asymptotic fall off. Bitcoin would survive that.
I made another post discussing Hashflare's decision to pause operations. The gap between adjustments is the space in which they can manipulate the market and play hokey-pokey (you turn your miners off, you turn your miners on, you turn your miners off, and you shake em all about) with hashing power. If other speculators see their action
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The problem here is that at some tipping point, lack of mining operations will increase transaction times which will make BitCoin unattractive because of it lacks liquidity, taking too long to verify transactions.
That's not how any of this works... If there's less compute being thrown at mining, the difficulty level of each subsequent block drops until the total compute in play is able to solve blocks in an average of 10 minutes. (That's Bitcoin. Others have different algorithms.)
Mining resources aren't the problem, and mining isn't even a part of the services Coinbase offers. Coinbase's primary offering is an exchange to fiat currency. If the exchanges fall, the inability to easily convert crypto to fiat will
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That's not how Bitcoin mining works.
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That's the exact opposite of how it's supposed to work.
If you think difficulty/prices is going to rise, you keep mining/buying now while it's low.
What's happening here is a large network has already invested $ into mining and established contracts for a fixed $ that is no longer profitable.
They're hoping to manipulate the network by pausing operations and waiting for difficulty to fall before they jump back in.
Pausing operations may send prices up in the near term, but it won't be until the difficulty adjus
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Which side of the bridge are you selling?
The underside, of course.
Re: The allure of *coin? (Score:2)
The allure for me as a developer is the fact that I can setup payments for an app using open standards. As many have said before, payments are a protocol that has been long missing from the Internet.
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Have you actually seen the Internet protocols?
BGP was designed on a pair of napkins. SMTP is a pile of hacks on top of workarounds laid over a protocol that was never supposed to handle important messages. HTTP has evolved to become the de facto face of the Internet... and a large portion of its traffic is just a wrapper around JSON data because JavaScript doesn't get raw socket access. It's taken three tries to get hostname resolution to its current state, and even that's rife with problems.
I love the Inte
Re: The allure of *coin? (Score:2)
Look up what an open standard is...
I have no desire to feed into a system where 1-3% of the wealth of nations flows into the financial industry just because people are really bad with small numbers.
how is this business work? (Score:1)
I'm confused with this business... is the intent the fee per hash pays for operating costs (including hardware/electricty/facilities/humans) ... then the maintenance fee is skims profits off the coins mined?
Complaining customer wrong -- buy don't mine (Score:5, Insightful)
Now the mistaken customers may be thinking they are willing to accumulate and hold until prices recover but they need to do some basic arithmetic. If they take the money they would spend on fees and just buy coins on the open market they will end up accumulating and holding *more* coins than if they continued mining. Their risk is the same, their potential payoff of their gamble (holding) larger.
Nothing is stopping them from accumulating and holding. They just seem mistakenly fixated on doing so in the less "productive" manner.
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Sunk costs and kids. Always ends the same way. They're mentally committed.
Re: Complaining customer wrong -- buy don't mine (Score:3)
This is the great Bitcoin Miner's Fallacy. So many do not understand the basics of what they're doing.
I talk to people all the time who talk about buying a GPU rig and finding a coin to mine. I always tell them the same thing: buy BTC instead. None of them do. None of them get much farther than "I can print money like a real hacker!"
The ones who make it a few steps farther end up paying for losing mining rigs.
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Crypto currencies can be both a bad place to store wealth and a great way to avoid capital controls.
Mining is a separate issue.
Not abruptly (Score:2)
Since this was in the TOS, it wasn't abrupt -- it was a 21 day countdown. One oddity; 5.5 says "The Mining process continues until said mining is profitable." Seems like that should actually say "_while_ said mining is profitable".
Its Pretty Much Just Fraud (Score:4, Informative)
One of the many big problems with bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general is that the bitcoin whales [bloomberg.com] own so much of the available coins that it enables collusion between a very small number of people to result in massive changes in the price of bitcoin. This makes the bitcoin market ripe for "pump and dump" [wikipedia.org] securities fraud.
Without a doubt, at least one of the bitcoin whales works for Hashflare, and was aware of the planned timing of the most recent "pump," which happened 3 days ago. [coinbase.com] Hashflare's customers bought and paid for 1 year contracts ahead of time. Hashflare used that up-front money to buy all the ASICs and GPUs to set up their mining data center. Now in theory, the contract is established obligating Hashflare to transfer all of the mined bitcoins to their contract holder's wallets for the next year. But now that the most recent pump was pretty successful... they would rather keep those coins for themselves and reap the profits that rightfully belong to the people who took the risk of buying their contracts up-front. Never-mind that they wouldn't have all that mining hardware if it wasn't for the investors that bought their contracts. This is blatant securities fraud, these guys should go to jail for it.
little endian makes me furious (Score:4)
OK editors, using little endian date formatting in the summary now? That makes me furious! News for Nerds demands ISO 8601!
serves me right, I guess. (Score:2)
I'm not bitter about it because I learned a lesson.. HF did not "screw" me over in that they did, in fact, pay out when my minimum amount/balance of BTC was met... I did lose 80% of my investment, though.
My fault for not completely understanding the difficulty increases and how that would affect the ROI. TBH, I probably didn't read the contract closely enough, because I ended up relieved that they weren't trying to charge me out-of-pocket for the maintenance fees on the contract. Instead, they simply charg
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This is why most of the "Cloud Mining" operations are scams --- they want to impose unreasonable maintenance fees on a regular basis; and they're disconnected from costs, essentially a huge markup, and now they want to abort mining if the BTC exchange rate makes it unprofitable for them? Screw that.
A fairer thing to do would be to charge the maintenance fee upfront based on actual cost. E.g. for a 365 day contract: approximately 100 Watts/Terahash = 2.4 kWh per day * 365 = 876 kWh per TH.
Tulip farmers discontinue Tulip shipping (Score:1)
Read all about it!
Tulip markets overvalued, based on tulips being more than pretty flowers.