It Is All About BTC, LTC, ETH, DOGE, KAS mining as well as other alternative crypto currencies
Ethereum (ETH) has reached a serious milestone passing 1 million blocks mined by users in a bit more than half a year since the official launch of mining. This is possible thanks to the fast block times on the Ethereum network as compared to Bitcoin for example that is just approaching block 400000 for more than 5 years of existence. Looking at the file size of the Ethereum blockchain data files we see that they have already grown to reach about 8 GB which is already pretty big, tough it is just about 12% of the Bitcoin blockchain that is already getting close to 65 GB in size. Passing the 1 millionth mined block means that about 5 million of Ether coins have been mined by users so far, but since there have been 72 million already available prior the start of the mining the total coin supply is currently at about 77 million already. The 60 million of these coins were sold to users prior the official launch of the Ethereum network, and the rest 12 million of the initial 72 million coins were used for developers and contributors and a s along term reserve.
Currently 1 Ether coins is being traded for about about $4.8 USD bringing the total market capitalization of Ethereum with all available coins to about 371 million USD positioning it at the second crypto coin just after 6 billion USD Bitcoin market cap. Leaving market capitalization aside, looking at the 24 hour trading volumes alone we can see that Ethereum is doing about 18-19 million USD while Bitcoin is currently at about 66 million USD. So while the gap in total market capitalization is quite huge, Ethereum is not that far behind in terms of trading volumes at the moment, meaning that there is really a lot of interest in it. What we need to see is if this peak of interest in Ethereum is going to last temporary or it will be going even stronger in the feature… we are ready to go for the latter.
Wargaming, the company behind the very sucessfull line of strategy-based massively-multiplayer online (MMO) games World of Tanks, World of Warships and World of Warplanes has announced their partnership with BitPay to add Bitcoin payment support. The company’s games are all free to play, and players can customize their gaming with new weapons and vehicles by purchasing in game resources and items. Now players in the United States can use Bitcoin to get the virtual gold that serves as Wargaming’s currency for in-game power-ups in World of Tanks, World of Warships, and World of Warplanes. Unfortunately there is no information if or when Bitcoin support will be added for other regions as the announcement specifically mentions support only for United States. Also it seems that Wargaming is not promoting the availability of Bitcoin payments as a separate entry in the list fo available payments yet and instead it is a part of the online payment types and not as a separate major entry in the list of available payment options. Still it is good news for both the players of the games and for Bitcoin as it continues to get accepted by more and more merchants as a payment method along other more traditional and established payment methods.
– For a guide how you can use Bitcoin as a payment method in the different games…
The total network hashrate of the Bitcoin network has reached another major milestone, passing over 1 Exahash per second or 1000 Petahashes per second peaking at 1,008,642,232 GHS according to the data from Blockchain.info. Interestingly enough the total network hashrate at the previous difficulty adjustment on January 13th was just about 811 Petahashes and back in November last year the hashrate was just about 500 Petahashes per second or half than what it is now. This is really serious and fast growth of the total network hashrate that Bitcoin is experiencing doubling in just about two months. So what comes next after Exahashes per second, can you guess when the network hashrate will get to Zettabytes or Yottabytes… maybe we are going to see these in the near future if it continues to grow at such fast pace.