Archive for the ‘Crypto News’ Category

The DAO is Under Attack, Ethereum Price Suffering

17, Jun 2016

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If you are wondering what is the reason for the sudden drop of the exchange rates of Ethereum all around, well it seems that the DAO has been attacked an somebody apparently found a way to steal a lot of ETH coins. There is still not a lot of official information regarding the issue, but until the situation is resolved and everything is clear you should be very careful trading DAO tokens and Ethereum Ether coins. It seems that the smart contracts are as smart as their authors and wherever there are a lot of money stored with automated control they always attract people willing to find a way to steal them, especially if they are not secured well enough. This could as well be the end of DAO if the situation is not taken care of good enough, but it will undoubtedly also hurt Ethereum. Hopefully things will soon clear out and we would be able to continue with the usual things like mining etc.

– For more details about the current situation and how you might be able to help…

Bitcoin Price Has Passed the $700 USD Mark

13, Jun 2016

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There is still a month before the second Bitcoin block reward halving occurs, but the last two weeks or so the exchange rate of Bitcoin has been steadily increasing from a little over $400 USD to over $700 already. The driving force behind this a bit unexpected significant increase is considered to be the Chinese markets that have been quite active lately with a lot of people buying bitcoins as a means of investment instead of keeping their fiat money (getting devaluated) or investing in other more traditional means such as stocks or gold for example. With this serious increase in price even before the halving of the block reward (the second one for Bitcoin) some of the people that jumped in early have managed to already get a nice profit. The big question however is how high will the BTC price go before the halving occurs and after it happens early next month…

AMD Radeon RX 480 (Polaris) is Now Official and Looks Promising

1, Jun 2016

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AMD today unveiled the first of its upcoming Polaris architecture-based Radeon RX series graphics cards – the Radeon RX 480 at a surprising price point, surprising at is it quite affordable compared to what you will have to pay for the latest generation of Nvidia Pascal GPUs. The AMD Radeon RX 480 as well as the other upcoming GPUs are all based on the 14 nm FinFET production process that the Polaris architecture utilizes. As a result what we expect to get is more performance with a lower power usage and at a more affordable price point and AMD delivers just that with the Radeon RX 480. The full specifications are not yet revealed, but we know the cards should be available on the market on June 29th with a price point of just $199 USD for the 4GB edition. The TDP rating of the new RX 480 GPUs is 150W, but we do not know all of the specifications yet, so it is hard to estimate what is the expected performance, especially for mining.

We already know that the RX 480 uses 256-bit memory bus and will come in 4GB and 8GB VRAM models, so the big question that many Ethereum miners are probably already asking is what performance can we expect from the new cards. Since Ethereum’s Dagger-Hashimoto algorithm is memory intensive one the speculated performance for Ethereum mining for the new AMD Radeon RX 480 is somewhere in between 20 and 30 MHS, hopefully around the full performance that Radeon 280x had with 1GB DAG files or around 26-27 MHS or more, but that is pure speculation for now. So we’ll have to wait and see some real numbers, but we are not going to be surprised if the lower priced RX 480 does manage to outperform the Nvidia GTX 1070/1080 at least for mining Ethereum, making the new Radeon the better solution for mining ETH. What you should not forget however is the fact that Ethereum mining is not going to last forever, sooner or later the coin will switch from PoW to PoS and you would have to switch to a different altcoin maybe with different algorithm where the RX 480 might not be the best choice…


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