The long wait for my Avalon ASIC 3 bitcoin miner was finally over. Almost my entire stash of bitcoin went into this purchase (just over 100btc). Based on the bitcoin mining calculators at the time, this thing was going to pay off my mortgage and then some. Unfortunately, it showed up several months beyond the promised delivery date which, given the increase in…
What do the 1950s military avionics technology and bitcoin mining servers have in common? In a word – heat, or, more precisely, cooling requirements. Blowing cold air over the innards of military aircraft and satellite electronics 60 years ago was as inefficient as blowing cold air through power-hungry bitcoin mining servers today. It was in the 50s that 3M introduced…
Can data centers tap unused server capacity to mine for Bitcoins? The question occurred to the team at the online backup service iDrive , which performs most of its customer backup jobs overnight, leaving its 3, quad-core servers idle for much of the day. So the company ran a test with 600 servers to see whether Bitcoin mining could become a secondary revenue…
Screenshot A multi-player server on the wildly popular video game Minecraft has introduced bitcoin to its world as a way of teaching children about digital currency. While in-game currencies exist in several different minecraft worlds, using bitcoin means that players can take their money out of the game and use it in the real world too. The server, PlayMC, features…
The people who got rich during the California and Alaskan gold rushes were not the gold miners, but the business who sold the shovels (and other supplies). Or at least that s how common wisdom goes. And it makes sense. Anyone can buy a shovel or a bitcoin mining rig, there s not much barrier to entry. Profitability should approach break-even or worse as new entrants…
Bitcoin is a virtual monetary system, a peer-to-peer currency with no central bank. It is based on digital tokens with no intrinsic value. An outstanding innovation in the 21st century payment system, bitcoin gained popularity in its initial phase in the FinTech industry, but gradually the virtual currency is losing its charm. Seeing the fluctuations and multiple…
When you think of trading or investing, you probably think of stocks and bonds. You might also think of commodities, currencies and whatnot. But strolling into a mutual fund manager s office and mentioning Bitcoins would probably get you an odd look, assuming he or she is not an avid reader of TechCrunch. Introduced in 2009, the electronic currency Bitcoin is…
To achieve this with an all-digital currency, the money supply is controlled by an algorithm that was configured to release a “block” of Bitcoin (sort of analogous to a nugget of gold) once every 10 minutes. But, according to the Genesis Block, the rate is speeding up. The Bitcoin algorithm essentially regulates the money supply like this: Blocks of Bitcoin are…
Lee Hutchinson Clearly, the BFL 5GH/s miner s mining days were done—and at an odd number of BTC mined, too. A new challenger appears I contacted Butterfly Labs and let them know that the fan had broken, and they immediately offered to send a replacement miner. At first I demurred, but on reflection I decided to take them up on their offer. The power numbers mentioned…
Please check this question first : How much Bitcoin will I mine right now with hardware X? Before you go through all this work, it is important to know what to expect from your hardware. There are two options: solo mining or pool mining. Unless you have a lot of computing power (several ASICs), you should probably mine at a pool. So the first thing to do is to…
Mining software companies try to reduce costs of Bitcoin mining meeting the challenge brought about by the cutting in half of the block rewards. Energy supply has been a topical issue of late for mining operations particularly around the halving period as it is a great determinant to ensure a lower operational cost and to maximize profit. A report says some of…
Bitcoin Mining profitability is something that is always in flux. Bitcoin having such a high difficulty and large total hashrate at times profitability comes down to several things. The first set of data you use for discovering if mining can be profitable for you or not is the following but not limited to: Cost of Bitcoin ASIC Miner or Miners Cost of electricity…
It s a common misunderstanding that score based reward systems like Slush s underpay infrequent miners. While it s true that shares in a given round devalue if you mine towards the beginning of a round and then leave long before it finishes, you have to also take into account the fact that the length of a round is random. So you have equal chances of arriving…
SHA-256 and Scrypt are the two most common algorithm systems used by cryptocurrency miners in order to authenticate blocks of transaction data. The system used, unfortunately, is not up to the miners; it s set by the developers of a given type of currency. When you go to cryptocurrency discussion boards and forums, you ll find there s a vigorous debate between…
How do you create a 500kW data center that can run inside a high-rise office building? That’s what Allied Control recently did in Hong Kong, where it created a data center that housed custom Bitcoin mining rigs in a rack-mounted immersion cooling system. We’ve as a novel implementation of high-density cooling for ASIC-based systems for validating Bitcoin transactions…
This is the first feature in our three-part series on Bitcoin mining infrastructure. The Bitcoin mining craze is driving the creation of a new breed of computing facilities featuring high-density hardware, low-reliability electrical infrastructure and off-the-shelf enclosures. These “hashing centers” often are built in old warehouses and house servers on shelving…
Bitcoin is an open-source, digital currency that has caught the public imagination for reasons good and bad in the last couple of years. Bitcoins are created as a reward for the computationally intensive work of verifying and recording payments in a public ledger. This work is called mining and the more computing power that is put in, the more bitcoins that are…
Bitcoin Group’s shares are now slated to debut for public trading on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX), under the symbol BCG, on February 2, 2016. This comes after the listing has been pushed back a few times before due to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) asking the group to clarify some statements. The Melbourne headquartered…
Is mining Bitcoin or any other digital currencies still profitable? It’s a question many are asking, but the answer may vary depending on the person. Digital currency mining has proven to be extremely popular over the last years, as it has been an easy way to earn “free” money and allowed people to accumulate their cryptocurrency portfolio. “Mining” is the term…
TL;DR: Mining is heavy duty number crunching, your iMac is useless for that. Running a node helps the network and gives you your own copy of the blockchain. Your iMac should probably be able to do that. Mining The purpose of mining is to 1. achieve consensus about the state of the network, 2. confirm transactions, and 3. initially distribute the bitcoins. For…
KnC Miner , a company that provides hosting services and builds software for bitcoin mining, has added 20 megawatts to what was previously going to be a 10 megawatt data center in Boden, Sweden, in the vicinity of a massive Facebook data center. The company said it decided to expand its data center capacity in Boden to a total of 30 megawatts and 160, square…
Things continue to heat up in the Bitcoin mining world as of late. As the hashrate continues to increase, it is only to be expected the mining difficulty continues to go up accordingly. Earlier this morning, the difficulty adjusted once again and increased by 7.43%. This adjustment marks a new all-time high for mining ever since bitcoin was created. New hardware…
Our computers has very less power when we compare it to the difficulty level of mining and it s very hard to get one bit coin. But to overcome the second issue there are pools . But still the first issue remains the same. The ordinary desktop computers doesn t perform in a good manner relative to performance/costs spent for the hardware . But, Google has a…
If you have been paying attention to bitcoin at all lately, you may have noticed a lot of talk going on about forks . Not like the kind you would find on a table, on a blockchain, a fork is a technical event that occurs because diverse participants need to agree on common rules. At its most basic, a fork is what happens when a blockchain diverges into two potential…
Bitcoin Exchanges Some Bitcoin miners simply keep the Bitcoins they mine, typically in a Bitcoin wallet on a PC (hopefully, they don’t forget to make backups of their wallets). Other miners may need to pay off their investment in mining hardware and want to cash out. The way to do that is to sell Bitcoins (or fractional Bitcoins) at one of the Bitcoin exchanges…
Refers to using targets greater than difficulty 1 for pool shares. With the advent of ASIC mining, many hashrates may be sufficiently high that difficulty 1 creates too much traffic for share submissions, and is expected to become necessary in the near future. Concept With rapidly-increasing hashing speeds, miners are rather wasteful in terms of bandwidth. Each…
We have collected four typical scams to remind you that Bitcoin is just cash, and you should take care to use it as real money: Carefully. Most frauds and scams don’t happen because of the technology involved but rather due to the underlying greed and callousness on the part of the users. There is something about Bitcoin that attracts all kinds of scam artists…
