Cryptocurrency & Mining News - Page 57

There was some huge cryptocurrency FUD spreading in early January, when South Korea was reportedly preparing a new bill that would ban cryptocurrency trading.

One of the officials who helped South Korea's regulatory changes on cryptocurrency, Jung Ki-joon, has been found dead in his home. Ki-joon was the head of economic policy at the Office for Government Policy Coordination, where he helped the efforts to mold a new legislation that would slow and stop crypto speculation and illegal activity.

Ki-joon is presumed to have had a heart attack, with Yonhap reporting that a government official said "he died from some unknown cause. He passed away while he was sleeping and [his] heart [had] already stopped beating when he was found dead".

I've had my fair share of issues with cryptocurrency wallet and app, Jaxx, but I've never written about them. I reached out to the company for help, and they really just brushed me to the side.

A few months ago I transferred $3500 AUD ($2770 USD) from Jaxx to Bittrex (a crypto exchange) and it kept on giving me error messages, but I persisted and tried again with the same error. After a few failed transactions, I realized my problem - I was using the built-in ShapeShift functionality.

This is why I was getting an error message, it was my mistake - but Jaxx was displaying that it was erroring. After this, I thought I would go back and do it properly only to see that $2770 of my funds had gone missing, because even with the 'error' it was taking my funds and throwing them into the blockchain, somewhere.

We all know that the cryptocurrency market has been turbulent over the last few weeks, but the price of Bitcoin has begun surging again and in the middle of all of this crypto chaos, someone purchased a huge $400 million worth of BTC.

The anonymous trader has a BTC address of 3Cbq7aT1tY8kMxWLbitaG7yT6bPbKChq64, with this person purchasing the large sum of BTC between February 9-12, taking their balance from 55,000 BTC to a huge 96,650. Who was it? Some say it was Wall St buying at the new bottom, which makes sense.

Jeff Koyen, president of 360 Blockchain USA said: "In the meantime, the $400 million whale is fuel for the Telegram channels where traders lay out their conspiracy theories. However, I am willing to believe that, seeing bitcoin bottom around $6,000, Wall Street smelled blood and jumped back in".

Atari is trying to make itself relevant in a new world filled with cryptocurrencies, so the company has unveiled two new cryptos: Atari Token and Pong Token.

The company has announced it has partnered with blockchain company Infinity Networks, where they will create tokens as part of an investment deal. First up, the Atari Token is for entertainment, with a press release detailing: "The company is developing a decentralized platform giving access to any form of digital entertainment,that is to say a very wide offer ranging from video games to movies and music. This platform, under development, will operate using a cryptocurrency, the Atari Token".

Pong Token is all about gaming, where it's explained as: "The second project in progress is the strengthening of the partnership with Pariplay, Ltd in the launch in 2018 of casino platforms allowing players to bet either in real money or with most crypto-currencies currently outstanding. These casino sites will offer many Atari games. To broaden the appeal of these new casinos, and once the Atari Token available, Atari has the project to launch Pong Token, a second Token dedicated to crypto-casinos and usable on these gaming sites. The details of this launch of crypto-casinos will be announced soon".

The hunt for hashrates by cryptocurrency miners is hurting the search for alien life, with miners pissing off SETI (Search For Extraterrestrial Life) as they can't find new GPUs to buy.

SETI chief scientist Dan Wethimer told the BBC: "We'd like to use the latest GPUs [graphics processing units]... and we can't get 'em. This is a new problem, it's only happened on orders we've been trying to make in the last couple of months". So it's not just gamers that are mad at the price of second hand and brand new cards, but the lack of stock of new cards is hurting more than just gamers, reaching into the scientific community.

SETI researchers need the GPUs to scan as many communications frequencies simultaneously, with SETI's base in Berkeley using 100 GPUs alone. SETI has other stations in Green Bank, West Virginia and Parkes, Australia are trying to expand, but the GPU shortage isn't helping. Werthimer continued: "We've got the money, we've contacted the vendors, and they say, 'we just don't have them".

Right now we're in one of the worst positions ever for consumer graphics cards, with prices sky high and stocks at rock bottom, most GPUs are being eaten up by crypto miners. What can help, other than a purported next-gen GeForce GTX 20 series and possibly mining-specific SKUs of GTX 20 series cards? Ethereum ASIC miners, that's what.

The latest news coming in from China is that mining giant Bitmain is working on an Ethereum ASIC miner, the purported Antminer F3. Bitmain's rumored F3 Ethereum miner would pack 3 motherboards with 6 ASICs per motherboard, as well as 32 x 1GB DDR3 memory chips that would make for a very power efficient, but incredibly powerful Ethereum ASIC miner. This would put GPU mining for Ethereum out of business, almost overnight.

Bitmain is reportedly meeting with a few manufacturers in Taiwan, so you can be sure that they're talking to TSMC and others in order to see how many chips they can get their hands-on.

Salon is one of the first digital media publications in the world to move to mining cryptocurrency from users' PCs, a massive shift from the norm of traditional online ads.

The site wants to provide free content to its users, but like TweakTown and most other websites that rely on advertisements to be run on their site, the company is struggling with a constantly shifting advertising landscape. Salon said that digital ad revenue has dropped $40 billion between 1999 and 2010, with Salon adopting new ways of making money from users without slapping ads all over the place.

Salon will be asking users that are using ad blockers if they wouldn't mind disabling their ad blocker so Salon can make money from the on-screen ads, or they can 'suppress ads' by allowing your ad blocker, but mining cryptocurrency on unused computing power.

It was only a few hours ago when I reported that the UK government has been hit with cryptocurrency mining malware, but now a bunch of Australian government websites have been compromised.

Down Under, the cryptojacking affected the "the Victorian parliament, the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal, the Queensland ombudsman, the Queensland Community Legal Centre homepage, and the Queensland legislation website, which lists all of the state's acts and bills", reports The Guardian.

Hackers used the same browser plug-in that the UK government was exposed with, Browsealoud, with the developers of the extension, Texthelp, confirming hackers infused crypto mining software Coinhive into their extension.

The cryptocurrency mining malware problem is extending into parts of the world that no one expected, with the UK government now directly affected with "thousands of websites" including sites belonging to NHS (National Health Services).

Over the weekend, the website of the Information Commissioner's office that is the UK's data protection watchdog, was taken offline in order to deal with crypto mining malware. The malware was inserted through websites codes to BrowseAloud, which is a plugin that helps the blind and partially-sighted people to use the internet.

CoinHive is back again as the culprit, where the malware is inserted through the compromised BrowseAloud plugin and then mines Monero on users' PCs. Scott Helme, an IT security consultant said he received a message from a friend who said their anti-virus had detected an issue after they had visited a UK government site.

Forget traditional bank robberies, that's like the wild west... especially now that we have cryptocurrency exchanges that can be hacked and a huge $170 million can be stolen at today's lowered values.

This is what has happened to Italian cryptocurrency exchange BitGrail, with the company announcing on its website that it has lost $170 million to fraudulent transactions, and that they've approached authorities over the matter. BitGrail has since suspended all withdrawals and deposits "in order to conduct further verifications".

BitGrail has said that it won't be refunding 100% of what users' lost, with BitGrail founder Francesco "The Bomber" Firano saying that there's no 100% way to refund users. Firano took to Twitter, where he tweeted: "Unfortunately there is no way to give it back to you at 100% (we only got 4 MLN XRN right now)".