Hashpanel.io wants to make it easy to keep track of your mining operations.
Mining can get complicated quickly. With the ever increasing need for hashpower, miners need an increasing number of machines. Just because a machine is out of date as a standalone miner, doesn’t mean that hashing power can’t be put to good use with several other machines, or pointed towards a coin with a lower difficulty.
The problem is that managing all of those machines quickly becomes a full time job in of itself. Machines break down, they overheat, sometimes they stop for no apparent reason at all. There aren’t a lot of options for managing all of those machines in a simple and easy to understand format.
Some miners have resorted to developing their own scripts and combining that with APIs from mining companies or pools, like Ghash’s API, but that process isn’t ideal and the experience of doing so, I am told, is “terrible”.
Hashpanel.io wants to solve all of that, and the software they have coming down the tubes looks very impressive. It keeps track of everything and puts it in an easy to read, easy to understand format. An unlimited number of miners can be added to the software and it tracks their actual hashrate compared to the manufacturer’s stated hashrate, their system log, and their performance over time. Everything is put into simple to read and understand charts. It will also alert you when any miners go down and you can use it to keep track of several different farms at once.
Best of all, the entire system is plug and play. No coding experience is necessary, no flashing of your miners to put in new software. Users simply set each miner up, choose what pools they are mining into and Hashpanel.io takes care of everything on its end. Any miner that uses a standard mining program (like cgminer) can be used with Hashpanel.io without any fuss.
The system is open-sourced and has a Rest API so developers can build and attach their own tools.
The goal of hashpanel.io is to lower the barrier of entry for small to medium sized mining operations, while also making life easier for larger operations and their customers. One of the potentially most significant uses of Hashpanel is that it could allow cloud mining companies to be more transparent.
Cloud mining companies are under a constant (pardon the pun) cloud of suspicion. Many customers are suspicious of the whole idea of cloud mining, but it is clear that some companies are more reputable than others. Providing some proof in pure blockchain data could be done, but very few companies are actually doing it. Hashpanel gives them no excuse. Giving customers a complete and open overview on exactly what the company has online at any one time, would go a long way towards quieting any ponzi scheme accusations.
Pricing is set with those goals in mind, with up to 20 miners managed for free (20 in beta, five in the general release) to allow hobbyists and small scale mining operations to take advantage of Hashpanel without cutting into their already razor-thin profits. Anything above that is considered “Enterprise” level and each miner will come with a fee. However, the hope is that the increased transparency and lowered manpower costs associated with maintaining the mine thanks to the management software will make it worth the fee.
Mining, like Bitcoin itself, was once the exclusive realm of the computer-ultra savvy. Now, even as the associated costs of mining rises, tools are being developed that are opening it up to a wider group. Maintenance and electricity costs remain impassable hurdles for most people, but the third biggest barrier: the technical expertise required to build and maintain a mining farm, is quickly being destroyed.