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Review: Plenty of Concerns with GAW Miners Hashlet Service

Disclosure: The GAW Miners Hashlet used in this review was purchased by Coin Fire at the full retail price. We did not receive a complimentary miner for this review nor any discount or payment to write about this service. As always, Coin Fire remains committed to providing honest and fair features on our site. This is not an endorsement of this mining service or any other service featured on this site. Investors beware and NEVER invest more than you can afford to no longer have.

GAW Miners recently made the rounds with a blitz of marketing and excitement with the launch of the new GAW Miners Hashlet. A fully hosted, online based cloud mining system that the company  through a partnership with ZenMiner has brought online and begun heavily marketing.

The system which originally launched with $15.99 USD price tag for 1MH/s of Scrypt based power has seen several changes in price to give the company what they say is time to deal with the influx of new customers they’ve received instead of outright stopping orders.

I proceeded to order a 1MH/s Hashlet for the purpose of this review and found the checkout process to be very fast and setting up the initial account for the Hashlet to be rather painless.

The checkout process was fast and just over a month ago when I ordered the miner I had many doubts about if it would ROI in an efficient way but I’ve been pleasantly surprised about the fact that we are just over a month since I ordered the miner and I have seen a ROI.

The ZenCloud Portal is a neat system for managing your miners and I ended up purchasing a few more to play around with and try different pools.

I found it strange that the company implies that you are pointing your mining power to a different pool however when you are changing where you are mining but it turns out that this isn’t actually the case. Initially several pool operators that are on the site as option began crying foul when they saw zero increase of hashing power on the pools they operated and began asking the company to give proof that miners were actually coming online for the pool selected.

Later the CEO of GAW Miners clarified the situation stating that the company is doing 100% of the mining on a private pool and that changing where you mine is simply a software change on the payout you would have received had you begun mining on the other pools. His statement regarding the situation:

After careful review, we’ve decided pointing our hashing power to these pools is counterproductive for our goal of promoting stability in this industry. Instead, we will be sending our hashing power to our own private pools, but keeping your payouts 100% based on the pool you select. This effectively gives you access to your favorite pools, but now with nearly perfect uptime.

This means when you change where your miner is “mining” you are simply changing what level of payout you receive and your actual mining power doesn’t change at all from one pool to another. I found this to be deceptive from the way things read on the dashboard and have found myself torn. Josh brings up a valid point about the reliability of pools but I felt this was still a bit deceptive and finding the information wasn’t easy about the situation.

I also have found it strange that the company markets miners that are named after the various pool offerings when those miners will never actually touch those pools. While his justification can make sense on a certain level the simple fact is that it implies the miners actually run on those pools for many users.

This process is outright dishonest at best in my mind and the company should do more to clarify that you are not actually mining on these pools. As it stands the statement from Josh above in now on a forums post since deleted and the best way to find this information is hidden in the Terms of Service which we quote directly here:

Selecting a Pool does not imply physically or electronically mining at the selected Pool. Rather, selecting a Pool determines a Payout corresponding to a calculation based on the selected Pool’s payout (based on, for example, real-time Megahash/second/day calculations). A Hashlet is virtual software. You will receive Payouts according to the Pool with with the Hashlet is associated. You expressly understand the the Company’s sole obligation to You is to Provide a Payout based on the Pool you choose.

It is also important to note that these are “virtual miners”. The graphics used in advertising materials are renders and that the software likely resides in a virtual environment so when you buy a miner it doesn’t actually look anything like what is being implied in the marketing materials. I won’t write this off as deceptive as this is a fairly common marketing tactic but one that warrants mentioning as I don’t see many others pointing it out in reviews.

Another issue that I have with the service is that they have NOT provided proof of a single block mined to date.

I have an issue with a provider that doesn’t give transparency about the miners, where they are mining, what the current hash rate is, where that power is pointed and proof that they are mining. It has been quite sometime since they concerns have been raised on various forums across the Internet and the company has failed to discuss many of them to date.

Many sites have been practically tripping over themselves to publish pieces singing the “unlimited praises” of the GAW Miners Hashlet services few have covered these glaring issues. I have personally seen a ROI from my miner buy and consider my review closed at the moment and will be selling my miners on the marketplace as I prefer to actually hold my mining equipment and not simply rent it from others.

Coin Fire reached out to GAW Miners several times for a comment before running this piece and each time we received zero response.

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1 comments on “Review: Plenty of Concerns with GAW Miners Hashlet Service”

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  1. While I can’t say that i’ve seen much of their hash power in the wild on the other pools – I did see 70 TH of Sha-256 power available for lease on leaserig.net from a user with an email address @btc.com — a domain owned by gawminers

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