Mining Roundup: Walmart, BFGMiner, and Altcoins in the Cloud

The recent meeting of minds between Chinese mining hardware suppliers brings back to the fore just how centralized mining continues to be.

A number of companies see the futility of the miner hardware game and are moving into hosted mining, or cloud mining.

While for the time being most hosted mining contracts only allow users bitcoin mining, Genesis Mining also offers a number of scrypt-based options.

The company provides mining power for bitcoin, litecoin, feathercoin, dogecoin, auroracoin, lottcoin and megacoin.

Perhaps trying to stay true to its slogan allowing people to 'save money, live better', Walmart is now selling bitcoin miners.

10GH/s of SHA-256 mining power isn't what it used to be anyway.

A popular client used with bitcoin mining hardware, BFGMiner updated its software to version 4.0.

It's entirely possible that future bitcoin mining rigs will only be able to run if provided with arbitrage opportunities in electrical costs.

A UK-based company called MegaMine sells hosted mining contracts in the 10GH/s to 10TH/s range.

Some of the biggest mining pools do not provide hashrate per miner data.