Launched in May 2018, Hashtoro cloud mining service has set out to revolutionize the mining of top coins, such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum and Zcash, introducing a new, efficient and eco-friendly approach. In this interview, Alexander Petersons, product director of the service, tells its story, shares some mining insights and gives his prognoses.

CG: With the mining difficulty sky-rocketing and rates dropping, can we declare Bitcoin mining dead?

No, even though getting steady profits from mining bitcoins has become a challenge. Today it requires a smart, careful approach. You have to cut your expenses and constantly reinvest in new capacities. A sharp increase of mining difficulty and emergence of ASIC miners widened the gap between individual miners and companies that mine cryptocurrencies on commercial scale. The demand for cloud mining providers is increasing; though when it comes to Bitcoin mining, even they struggle sometimes. Hashflare is a good example of that.

As far as Bitcoin rate is concerned, I believe that, under certain conditions, we can see it go up again soon – maybe even this year. For example, further legalization and popularization of Bitcoin will undoubtedly lead to its growth.

CG: What would be the smartest way to enter mining today?

There are two options for individual miners: using your own equipment or using cloud mining services. Building a rig has become expensive and tricky, especially if your goal is mining top cryptocurrencies. Even if we take less popular coins, one needs certain skills in assembling and setting up the equipment. You have to monitor the farm, take care of cooling, and constantly clean it from dust. A single ASIC would produce the amount of heat large enough to warm the apartment. I heard about guys who produce miners that can be used as room heaters in the winter. Smart, but what would you do in the summer? Plus you would have to deal with high level of noise. 

Cloud mining is a perfect choice for those who don’t want to go in trouble with buying, configuring and maintaining the rigs. It attracts both beginners and experienced miners who want to expand their portfolio, allowing to enter the world of cryptocurrency mining with small starting investments: in our case, as low as 20 euros.

CG: Which coin is best to mine today?

It would depend on the rate dynamics and available equipment. At the beginning of 2018, it was more profitable to mine ETH and LTC, but when their price went down, Bitcoin became more attractive to miners once again. We have been mining BTC, ETH, and LTC in equal shares in order to distribute risks. Now we are also starting to mine ZCash, which has been rising in popularity during the last year. According to crypto analysts, it is one of the most profitable cryptocurrencies to mine today. I think it’s a very promising coin.

As a cloud mining provider, Hashtoro uses the latest ASIC miners, which gives us an opportunity to mine top coins. However, of course, it’s still possible to mine less popular coins, even with GPUs.

CG: How did you come up with the idea of Hashtoro?

Our team has years of experience in developing high-load projects, managing, installing and maintaining a large number of servers and working with big data. The range of projects in our portfolio is wide: from social networks to cloud hosting. Apart from that, we’ve been mining BTC since 2013. So at some point, we decided to try ASIC mining and found out that it is a fairly profitable niche.

CG: You’ve recently announced limiting BTC contracts due to high demand. What’s your recipe for success in the time of crisis?

We offer cheap cloud mining contracts with low maintenance fees. For example, the price is 0.4 Euro per 10 GH/s for BTC mining 1-year contract or 0.85 for 10GH/s for the unlimited contract. To make such pricing possible, we had to cut expenses as much as we could – of course, without compromising the quality of our services. We’ve placed our farms in crypto-friendly European countries that actively use renewable energy sources.

We searched for available spaces with low rent price and a possibility of connecting 5MW and above and using reduced tariffs. It allowed us to save on electricity and gave us plenty of available power. At the moment, we have 100 MW facilities in Finland and Norway, equipped with Bitmain ASIC miners.

Our second key is efficiency. Hashtoro uses machine learning algorithms to choose the best mining strategy. We also accelerate our miners, which gives us 10-20% more hashrate. Later this year, we plan to start developing our own ASIC chips, to increase overall mining efficiency even further.

CG: Hashtoro positions itself as the first eco-friendly cloud mining provider. What does it mean?

When the rates flew up, all everyone in the crypto industry could think of was getting a piece of the pie. Now more and more people are becoming aware of the damage mining might do to the environment. The amount of electricity cryptocurrency networks consume every year is incredible.

Hashtoro’s mining farms are 100% powered by renewable energy sources. Besides that, we give away the surplus heat generated by our equipment to warm the water for the local community. This way it doesn’t go to waste. We also get a refund from the government, which covers up to 20% of our electricity expenses. Being mindful allows us to make our contribution to the development of eco-friendly mining, save money and resources both at the same time.

CG: How do you ensure the safety of user’s money and personal details? Can you give our readers some advice on personal financial security?

Hashtoro is PCI-DSS-certified, which means that all the transactions meet the highest standards of renowned payment systems, such as Visa or Mastercard. All the sensitive user information is safely encrypted. To ensure protection from virus attacks, our system and website are regularly scanned for malware.

We never store coins in a hot purse. All mined coins are transferred to a cold purse, and payouts are made manually once a day.

There are also a few simple measures you should take do to make sure you keep what you’ve earned: check your computer for viruses regularly, use a cold purse for long-term coin storage and keep your passwords and keys safe.