Cryptocurrency & Mining - Page 33

Now that Bitcoin has reached record heights of $9483, it made me remember the story of someone throwing away a HDD with a bunch of Bitcoin on it back in 2009.

The original story is that James Howells had 7500 Bitcoins in 2009, stored the HDD with the cryptocurrency on it until 2013, and then threw it in the trash. The story was picked up in 2013 as Bitcoin was reaching the then-dizzying heights of $1000, Howells at the time said he'd "never thrown a hard drive out before" had taken his PC apart as he spilled a drink on it.

He took the HDD out and threw it out amongst other hardware as party of a "clearout of old IT equipment", but not long after Howells said he took interested in Bitcoin and reached out to the dump where his rubbish ended up. The dump manager said that the HDD "could be 3 to 5 feet deep" in landfill, the size of a soccer field.

It has been one of the most amazing weeks in the short life of cryptocurrency, with Ethereum reaching record highs and now Bitcoin hitting a new high of over $9000. An incredible journey this year, and over the last five years.

Bitcoin reached its record high of $9483 on November 26 at 7PM, floating back down to $9344 at the time of writing. BTC opened at $8763 and hit a high of $9484 giving it a market cap of an incredible $151 billion. This means the entire cryptocurrency market value now stands at a mammoth $285 billion, with BTC responsible for well over 50% of that alone.

Ethereum has had an explosive year that has culminated in the cryptocurrency reaching a record new high of $424, increasing in price by over 12% in just 24 hours.

ETH is continuing its upward trend as the second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, and has bounced back since its record high $414 price in mid-June. Back in June is when we saw Ethereum mining explode, resulting in me setting up and continuously upgrading a 60-graphics-card strong Ethereum mine. I have culled the mine a bit, and I'm down to 40-something cards.

Ethereum is currently processing more transactions per day than all of the other cryptocurrencies combined, with Ethereum mining difficulty on pause for the next year. It actually dropped significantly on October 16, relieving pressure from miners that would've other wise given up. BCH (Bitcoin Cash) is also able to be mined on consumer GPUs, as it doesn't need ASIC-specific hardware like its big brother Bitcoin (BTC).

Bitcoin continues its path towards $10,000 USD and while it might not have reached it yet, it has been edging into the mid $8000s for a while now. Most people don't realize that Bitcoin mining is a very big deal in China, as too with Russia.

China has put their foot down with Bitcoin miners, with the country set to cut your electricity supply if you're draining power mining Bitcoin, since miners would be using the lions share of electricity in the area. It's being reported in the country that China is noticing massive power consumption in some areas, and if they find out it's because someone is mining Bitcoin, they will limit electricity supply to some users in some areas during peak times.

The Chinese government have issued warnings to people in Danba County, Sichuan, which is one county where Bitcoin miners are gathered in China. There's also Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and others which leverage hydroelectricity and wind power to generate electricity, making it an easy decision for massive Bitcoin miners.

The list of websites that are mining cryptocurrency on users' CPUs is growing, with the phenomenon seeing the creation of the term 'cryptojacking' to fit this new hijacking of users' computers.

The Pirate Bay were one of the first with a javascript-based cryptocurrency miner, but were followed by others that jumped onto the lets-use-our-readers-CPU-for-mining bandwagon. There are people out there that agree with letting the website mine on your CPU while you're visiting the site, if the ads are completely disabled.

But then there's the concern of having multiple websites open in different tabs all trying to secure your CPU resources at once, it could cause problems. ArsTechnica is now reporting that th ere are at least 2500 websites that have embedded cryptocurrency miners that are hidden away from users.

Bitcoin has been steadily rising every single day for the last couple of weeks, breaking through barriers like $6500, and even $7000 - reaching a peak of $7600 before landing at $7621 at the time of writing.

The market cap of Bitcoin is now an incredible $124 billion, while the total value of all cryptocurrencies flew past $200 billion, largely driven by Bitcoin's near unstoppable charge into notoriety. But, this is where things get exciting.

Fundstrat co-founder Tom Lee says that the number of unique Bitcoin addresses has exploded in August, blowing their expectations out of the water, and reaching their mid-2018 expectations, now. Investor interest in cryptocurrency has been mooning lately, and has driven the price of Bitcoin up by 700% from earlier this year when it was under $1000.

Bitcoin has hit a new record of $6000, with the largest cryptocurrency reaching a total market value of $100 billion. If we compare this to credit card company American Express, which has a market value of $96 billion, Bitcoin is a serious thing now more than ever before.

A single Bitcoin reached $6064, reaching a market value of $100.81 billion or so, which is all leading up towards the upcoming Bitcoin fork that's expected on October 25. Then weeks later on November 18, Bitcoin will roll through SegWit2x, which is going to cause more instability (good, or bad) in the price of BTC.

With some people saying Bitcoin could be worth $100,000 or even $1 million per BTC, that reality could be here much sooner, rather than later. Just imagine being that person who traded 40,000 BTC back in the day for some pizza... that is worth $240 million right now. Ugh.

It is the new rage of 2017 to have your website mining Monero, or other forms of cryptocurrency, riding users' CPUs to make money. There's a good way of doing this, and a bad way... but now PolitiFact is joining in on the crypto mining fun, unintentionally.

PolitiFact visitors have noticed that their CPUs are being used, thanks to the site's JavaScript code being hacked. The site has confirmed with TechCrunch that they've removed the code, and is now working out how it happened. With 3.2 million page views per month, they'd be making a pretty penny from people looking to the site for legitimate content.

PolitiFact's hacked JavaScript code used CoinHive, which has been used before as they're a third-party service that uses users' CPUs to mine cryptocurrency. Hijacked CPUs mining cryptocurrency seems to be all the rage right now, and I don't think it's going to slow down.

Bitcoin has reached the heights of $4500 once again, for the first time in a month, and right now it has no signs of stopping. Bitcoin is headed towards a hard folk, which in very simple terms is a software upgrade that "introduces a new rule to the network that isn't compatible with the older software. You can think of a hard fork as an expansion of the rules. (A new rule that allows block size to be 2MB instead of 1MB would require a hard fork)", explains CoinDesk.

At the time of writing, BTC was trading at $4576 USD, with a high today of $4626. The Bitcoin fork takes place on October 25. We could see the price of BTC rising past $5000, or higher, as owners of 'altcoins' begin selling or trading their currency for BTC, wanting to ride the high. Altcoins are also taking a hit in price already with many on Facebook groups that I follow worried about the downtrend in altcoin pricing, but the big uptick in BTC pricing.

There are a few things happening on October 25, with the Bitcoin hard fork leading us right into the arms of Bitcoin Gold (BTG). BTG is the result of the Bitcoin fork, with BTC holders to receive the same amount of BTC as you have in BTC on the day that the Bitcoin blockchain snapshot is being taken, October 25 in this case.

Inno3D has finally released their cryptocurrency mining cards, with the limited 3-month warranty cemented in with the P106-based mining cards.

The new P106 mining cards are stripped down GeForce GTX 1060 graphics cards with their display connectors taken away, but without display connectors the mining-specific cards can't be used for gaming, ever.

As for specs, the P106-090 has 768 CUDA cores, which is way less than the 1280 CUDA cores on the proper GP106-400, the GPU that powers the GTX 1060. Anyone that mines knows CUDA cores don't do much for performance, it all comes down to memory bandwidth and speeds.

It was only last week that we reported that The Pirate Bay was caught mining Monero coins on visitors' CPUs, but now two of Showtime's websites have been using visitors' CPUs to mine Monero.

Showtime has been busted with a script running in the background that hijacks users' CPUs to mine Monero, thanks to the Coinhive miner. Coinhive isn't all bad, as they are trying to push into a market that simply doesn't exist right now: providing a way for websites to run, without using ads.

Coinhive takes 30% of whatever Monero is mined on users' CPUs, while the website keeps the rest.

I've adopted cryptocurrency like a mad man in the last couple of months, with my own mine powered by 50 graphics cards, but I do it for the love of technology and for the love of the future. Ethereum, and many other cryptocurrencies are the future of finance in the world.

Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin has said that Ethereum could replace things like credit card networks, and gaming servers. Buterin explains: "There's the average person who's already heard of bitcoin and the average person who hasn't".

Buterin continued: "Where Ethereum comes from is basically you take the idea of crypto economics and the kinds of economic incentives that keeps things like bitcoin going to create decentralized networks with memory for a whole bunch of applications. A good blockchain application is something that needs decentralization and some kind of shared memory".

While there's a global GPU shortage because of cryptocurrency mining with Ethereum and other alt-coins, users of The Pirate Bay have found JavaScript code in the website that "borrows" your CPU to mine Monero.

Not every TPB user is noticing the Monero coins being mined, but when you feel your PC running sluggishly, check Task Manager and see if your CPU usage is maxed out. But it's not something nefarious, as the website has spoken with TorrentFreak and said it was testing the Monero mining feature as a new way to bring in revenue... eventually replacing ads.

You can block the miner for now, by modifying your browser settings, or ad-blocker add-ons for your web browser. It's an interesting way to drive revenue without ads, making me wonder if this is the future of ads on the web.

ASUS has just come to the rescue of all cryptocurrency miners with their new B250 Mining Expert motherboard, the world's first mining motherboard with freakin' 19 PCIe slots.

The new ASUS B250 Mining Expert motherboard rocks 19 x PCIe slots, and takes 3 x 24-pin ATX power connectors which is simply insane.

It will support Intel's 6th and 7th generation CPUs, and up to 32GB of DDR4 RAM in dual-channel mode.

For the first time ever, Bitcoin has reached the dizzying heights of $4500, quadrupling its price since December 2016.

The naysayers of Bitcoin are coming out of the cracks, with The Next Web talking with CoinDesk, who said: "There's certainly a lot of bullishness about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, and that's the case with bubbles in general. The psychology of bubbles fuels it. You just become more convinced that it's going to work. And the higher the price goes, the more convinced you become that you're right. But it's not going up because it's going to work. It's going up because of speculation".

TNW said that Peter Schiff, who they call a "longtime opponent to the idea that cryptocurrency has any long-term potential", said that the Bitcoin bubble is "about to burst". Now while it might deflate, I don't think it's going to go down and stay down - and if it does, it should scale back up just like it has done again now, to the heights of $4500.

The Ethereum mining boom hits its peak in June, but it hasn't stopped casual - and professional miners from continuing to mine the digital cryptocurrency. The current price of Ethereum is actually quite good, where at the time of writing it had reached $300.

Back to the mining, where I've scoped out the difficulty chart for Ethereum which is continuing to grow. Earlier this month it reached 1.5T, up from the 1.25T or so towards the end of July.

But now, Ethereum mining difficulty has spiked to 1.75T, its highest yet. If you're still mining Ethereum, I've written an article saying Ethereum mining is DEAD... and I still stand by those words. If you've got graphics cards laying around... sure. But I wouldn't advise ANYONE to invest in hardware to mine Ethereum right now, or ever again.