Cryptocurrency & Mining News - Page 4

This year hasn't been very nice to cryptocurrency prices, with Bitcoin tumbling down to some worrying lows but now it is recovering in the best way it has for 2018 alone.

Bitcoin is now sitting pretty at over $9000, representing a 33% rise from April 1's low of $6926, the largest increase in BTC's price this year. Bitcoin dropped from its massive price of $13,860 on January 1 to a much lower $10,166 on February 1, and then down to $7000 in March.

We still need to see Bitcoin rise above $10,000 before it is on the road to a proper recovery, but we need to see it at over $17,000 as it was before January before we can rest easy.

At the time of writing, Bitcoin was sitting at $9074 but we all know how quickly that can change. At this rate, I'm hoping to see BTC valued at over $10,000 again before the end of the month, if all goes well.

This is one of the most exciting applications for blockchain tech and is a huge win for you, me and the online media companies we interact with! The ad-blocking browser Brave has partnered with Dow Jones Media Group. Why would they do that you ask? Especially when media groups detest ad-blocking software.

Brave, while people love it for its ad-blocking capabilities, never intended to completely block ads, they want to do it better. They want to deliver more privacy and security, a faster browser experience, fewer middlemen and reward users and content creators.

This is where the blockchain comes in! Brave Software have created the Basic Attention Token (BAT) which will allow for blockchain based digital advertising to value user attention securely and accurately. Brendan Eich, the creator of Javascript and co-founder of Mozilla and Firefox is the CEO of Brave Software and the founder of BAT, wants to help protect users while also making sure content is rewarded appropriately.

Today during a live stream on Diary of a Made Man, Ian Balina noticed something astray... he was being hacked! Balina is a Blockchain and Cryptocurrency investor who has over 150,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel where he reviews ICOS. Balina looks to have lost over $1,000,000 in this hack.

When he first realised this was happening he put out a tweet showing his ether wallet addresses where his tokens were stolen from and also the wallet addresses of the hackers, asking for help from his Twitter community. The tweets have subsequently been deleted by Balina. The three wallets of the hackers coming to $1,396,986.31 in total, as of writing this article yet you can watch live as the tokens are being moved out, presumably sold, even as soon as 9 minutes ago.

In truly terrible form, there are people commenting in etherscan on the hackers wallet address asking for a slice of the pie by posting their addresses and asking for some of the stolen tokens. Unfortunately, people are saying that Balina made himself too much of a target by posting snapshots of his portfolio which contained upwards of $3,000,000 in tokens.

CNBC Fast Money's Brian Kelly has likened Bitcoin adoption to the internet adoption stages in the way it will change tech, but we are only in the 1980s internet adoption stage. He said he thought we might be 1995 internet stage but after the last couple of months talking to people, its still very early days!

Laura Shin, a crypto/blockchain journalist, echoed the same sentiment in her interview with CNBC Africa, saying that people are drawing parallels between bitcoin and the internet and we are in a very early phase of growth in this industry. Shin went onto say that it's a good idea to try and get in on the ground floor and ride the wave up as there are so many big players coming in and providing good infrastructure solutions which did not exist until recently.

Crypto communities erupted in the past 24 hours with bitcoin having its biggest single-day surge since December! In only an hour bitcoins price surged by over a thousand dollars from just under $7,000USD to just over $8,000USD. The price how now sitting around $7,765, up 12.07% since yesterday. Some reports suggested that bitcoin had processed the most amount of trades within a one-hour period on April 12 than any other day in its 10-year history.

The market is beautiful and green across the board, getting everyone excited! EOS still holding 5th place in the top ten in preparation for the airdrop. There has certainly been enough positive news in the community for people to relax and buy up some more while we are currently hovering around the $7,000-$8,000 mark. Keep in mind, on this day last year, bitcoin was trading at $1,201 and had a market cap of only $19,541,300,000.

Let's take a look at a hard fork first, according to Investopedia it is: "a radical change to the protocol that makes previously invalid blocks/transactions valid (or vice-versa)".

Investopedia continued: "This requires all nodes or users to upgrade to the latest version of the protocol software. Put differently, a hard fork is a permanent divergence from the previous version of the blockchain, and nodes running previous versions will no longer be accepted by the newest version."

That possibly makes things as clear as mud, in its most basic form, a hard fork is a software upgrade that is not backwards compatible with the old software. In other words, everyone has to upgrade to the new system in order to participate. There are currently two basic hard forks people talk about, 'planned' hard forks and 'contentious' hard forks.

Bitmain unveiled its first Ethereum ASIC miner with the Antminer E3, with an April release window that has now been delayed into July after the ASICs "weaker-than-expected performance" reports DigiTimes.

Until now, Bitmain was expected to have full batches of the new Ethereum ASIC miners in late-July, but now the company will ship a small batch in July and the rest of them in Q4 2018 after the company released a refined version of the Antminer E3. The initial Antminer E3 should pump away at 180MH/s, offering the hashing performance of 5 x GTX 1080 Ti graphics cards. The revised one, could be many hundreds of megahashes per second... which would be great.

DigiTimes reports that shipments of the Bitmain Antminer E3 were meant to get close to 2 million units, and even weith the delay Bitman is expected to still reach the same goal according to industry sources. DigiTimes adds: "Bitmain will begin accepting pre-orders for the Antminer E3 in April and will start a small volume of shipments in July. The mass shipments of the ASIC miner are planned for the fourth quarter of 2018 after the release of a revised version of the miner,the sources said, adding the ASIC is manufactured on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's (TSMC) 28nm process".

Bitmain is currently talking with TSMC about manufacturing on their fresh 7nm node, while they are getting their 16nm and 28nm mining and AI chips made. The report continues: "Bitmain's 16nm Bitcoin ASIC orders have recently been shifted from TSMC's Fab 14 in Taiwan to the fab in Nanjing, China as Fab 14 will be upgraded to support a 12nm manufacturing process. The orders are expected to begin shipments in May".

EOS has gone on a massive bull run in the past 24 hours, running up a massive 42%! It has now overtaken Litecoin in Market capitalisation by $539,000,000 and has taken 5th place in the top ten cryptos. Many are speculating it is because of the eosDAC airdrop that is due to start on April 15.

November 2017 through to February of this year saw many people scramble into the crypto space. Recording breaking amounts of people, not just record-breaking, exchange breaking amounts!

Many exchanges having to shut their doors to new investors so they could handle the sheer amounts of orders being placed on their books. This is when the trouble began for banks. Bank accounts and credit cards were bled dry all over the world as people believed they could 'get rich quick' by investing what they had into bitcoin or altcoins.

Some banks closed people's accounts, others stopped people from being able to use their credit cards and others issued sky-high fees. JPMorgan Chase & Co did the latter and are now being sued for it. JPMorgan decided to charge their credit card users up to 30% in interest and additional fees. Brady Tucker, a Chase credit-card customer from Idaho, seeking a class-action suit against Chase claimed the bank began treating his cryptocurrency buys through CoinBase like cash advances instead of purchase.

Even with Cboe powering forward and looking at offering futures on other tokens, they may be up for some serious competition sooner than we thought.

Bloomberg asked Jeffrey Sprecher, CEO of Intercontinental Exchange Inc, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange when cryptocurrency futures contracts will be offered on one of his exchanges he replied:

"There is a trend here we can't ignore in my mind, so I don't discount it, it's early days. There is something about technology today that many people are more comfortable with than the institutions of government and society that I grew up with. People put more faith in a guy named Satoshi Nakamoto that no one has ever met than they do in the U.S. Fed. It's an interesting trend that you cannot ignore."