Archive for the ‘Crypto News’ Category

BitPay Now Offering Free and Unlimited Bitcoin Processing Plan

30, Jul 2014

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BitPay, a Bitcoin payment processor, has announced a new free plan which offers basic payment processing free-of-charge, forever, making it even more attractive for new businesses to start accepting payments in Bitcoin from their customers. The new free plan allows merchants to use any plugin, API, or app from BitPay’s library and the only difference as compared to the $300 USD monthly Business plan is the lack of phone support and Quickbooks sales integration. With the free plan you still get support, however it is email only. BitPay is aiming to have one million merchants accepting Bitcoin by the end of 2016.

Coinbase, another similar service, has been offering for quite some time a plan to merchants that has no fees for the first $1,000,000 USD in transactions, after that the fee is just 1% to instantly convert Bitcoin to cash. The idea for accepting Bitcoin payments is to lower the fees for the seller and thus the price for the end user as compared to the fees when accepting credit card payments for example. This should help widen the Bitcoin adoption as a method to pay for services and goods with the merchant still getting his payment in USD or another currency even though the client pays in Bitcoins.

– For more information about the Bitcoin payment processing services offered by BitPay…

Alpha Technology To Start Shipping ASIC Miners in September

29, Jul 2014

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As we are nearing the end of July, Alpha Technology, a Scrypt ASIC manufacturer has announced that they will not be shipping this month as they were previously targeting in order to beat the competition. The company announced that they have had technical issues during tape-out which has caused them to redo some portion of the ASIC layout one more time thus delaying the chip fabrication. According to them the tape-out is mid-way now and there should be no more delays, also in parallel to the tape-out process they have already started the fabrication of the PCB’s and enclosures. Regardless the shipping has now been moved to September, so there is some chance that KnCMiner might start shipping their Titan units earlier by the end of the next month, even though Alpha Technology were supposed to try hard to deliver first. And while this is not so good as new for the people that have pre-ordered Scrypt ASIC miners from Alpha Technology, though quite a lot have already requested or even received their refunds, it is good news for the people that have purchased some of the currently available Scrypt ASIC miners such from Gridseed, ZeusMiner, Innosilicon as they will have more time with smaller increase in the total network hashrate before the big miners start shipping.

ScryptGuild Mining Pool is Going to be Shutting Down in September

28, Jul 2014

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The ScryptGuild Scrypt mining multipool has announced that they are going to be shutting down on September 27, 2014. However the mining servers will halt in 2 weeks, which is August 10th. Users will have until September 20th to withdraw their balances before the coin daemons and wallets are taken offline. The information about ScryptGuild shutting down is apparently not directly related to the New York Bitcoin Regulations that are currently in the works, however there is information that the BTC Guild mining pool might also be closed down if these regulations are approved in their current form.

Under the current proposals (subject to public comment and revision), operating a pool within the US will be impossible to do legally without obtaining significant personal information on ALL users, not just those in the US. There would also be significant financial costs which would exceed the amount of money the pool has generated since inception. Since there is no way anybody will mine on a pool with those requirements, it means that any pool in the US will be forced to shut down, or operate illegally and hope they’re ignored.

If the regulations are finalized (this is unlikely to happen for at least 3-4 months if not more) in a form that still applies to pools, the pool will be forced to shutdown. This news post is being made as notice that this is an exception to the stated 3-month closure window identified in our FAQ and the forum thread. If the regulations pass, the 3-month window will be reduced to 45 days due to legal requirement to cease operations prior to the regulations taking effect.


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