Born out of the original Bitcoin blockchain on August 1, 2017, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) has split the cryptocurrency community into warring factions with their own arguments, verbal skirmishes, leaders, convictions and occasional get-togethers. On November 15, BCH developers are preparing to undergo its next hard fork, a split of the blockchain, which can give birth to new tokens named Bitcoin SV (Satoshi’s Vision), Bitcoin Unlimited and Bitcoin ABC. How Bitcoin Cash appeared The Bitcoin evolution has been constantly debated within the developers community, who had opposing views on what technology to implement and what rewards miners should receive. In July …
Ahead of the imminent Bitcoin Cash (BCH) hard fork, mining giant Bitmain has rushed to deploy around 90,000 Antminer S9 machines to the western Chinese region of Xinjiang, Chinese blockchain news source DeepChain reports Nov. 8. As reported, the BCH network will hard fork on Nov. 15, and Bitmain is reported to be strategizing its role in the forthcoming computing “power war” by reaching out to local mining farms in the coal-rich region of Xianjing. Local mining pool operator Yu Hao told DeepChain that the mining titan has been in talks with “almost all” the local mining farms since late …
Bitcoin (BTC) mining behemoth Bitmain has unveiled its next-generation ASIC chip soon to be used in the firm’s new “Antminer” crypto mining machines, Reuters reports September 21. An Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) chip is a piece of tailored mining hardware geared to mine cryptocurrency based on a specific hashing algorithm. Bitmain CEO and co-founder Jihan Wu reportedly announced the new crypto-mining-specific ASIC chip BM1391 during his keynote lecture at the World Digital Mining Summit in Georgia. According to Wu, Bitmain has now started to mass produce the chip and plans to integrate it into its next-generation Antminer machines. The new …
The CEO of China-based crypto mining pool F2Pool posted a company-branded infographic September 6 that indicates at what minimum price points the mining of various cryptocurrencies becomes unprofitable. Shixing Mao, co-founder and CEO and of the world’s sixth largest mining pool F2Pool, published a list of price levels for major cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), and Zcash (ZEC) below which mining said currency with various different miners allegedly becomes unprofitable. According to Mao’s graphic, if Bitcoin’s price hits lower than 36,792 yuan (about $5,376) point, this would mean that mining the cryptocurrency on an Antminer T9 …
Economist Alex de Vries, who published an article on “Bitcoin’s Growing Energy Problem,” yesterday, May 16, in scientific journal Joule, told the Independent that Bitcoin (BTC) mining will use 0.5 percent of the world’s energy by 2018. De Vries concludes that as the BTC network currently consumes about 2.55 GW of electricity and moves towards consuming 7.67 GW in the future (for reference, Ireland consumes 3.1 GW and Austria 8.2 GW), the network “has a big problem, and it is growing fast.” However, he does note that solutions like the Lightning Network “may alleviate the situation.” Bitcoin mining requires energy …
Both intentional cryptocurrency mining and cryptojacking is becoming more prevalent on college campuses than in any other industry, according to a blog post published March 29 by cyber attack monitoring firm Vectra. Vectra analyzed five industries where crypto mining – which the blog post defines as “an opportunistic attack behavior that uses botnets to create a large pool of computing power”, incorrectly combining crypto mining and cryptojacking into one use case – has occurred from August 2017 to January 2018, finding that “higher education” sees more mining than the other four industries combined. Universities are not able to monitor their …