Archive for the ‘Crypto News’ Category

BTCe Crypto Currency Exchange Adds Chinese Yuan Trading

30, Mar 2014

btce-chn-trading-pairs-added

With all the panic in China regarding the trading of crypto currencies for cash that brought the price of crypto currencies down the BTCe crypto currency exchange has seen some potential in attracting new customers and has added Chinese Yuan trading options. The exchange now has two new trading pairs available BTC/CNH and LTC/CNH and also USD/CNH that is available only on their MT4 software trading platform that you can download and use for trading on the exchange. Since this is a new feature that has just been announced the trading volume is not yet significant, however in a few days it will probably grow a lot.

– For more information about the addition of Chinese Yuan trading pairs on the BTCe exchange…

KnCMiner Titan ASIC To Offer 250 MHS Instead of 100 MHS Scrypt Hashrate

27, Mar 2014

kncminer-titan-scrypt-asic-device

Initially when the Titan Scrypt ASIC has been a announced earlier this month by KnCMiner they have said it would be 100 MHS in terms of hashrate as a guaranteed minimum, but now the company has just announced that they will guarantee a minimum of 250 MHS. The price of the device remains the same – $9995 USD without VAT and the shipping date remains Q2/Q3 with Q3 being more realistic. The company also offers the people that have preordered their upcoming Neptune SHA-256 ASIC to switch to the Titan Scrypt ASIC if they want to.

This new announcement definitely will make a serious difference when the company starts shipping the Titan Scrypt ASIC and it will end the era of GPU mining for Scrypt-based crypto currencies. The 250 MHS Titan Scrypt miner will be able to run on an 800-1000 watt power supply according to KnC, so you can safely say that Litecoin and other Scrypt crypto currencies are now really starting to go on the same road as BTC did a while ago. In ust a few months there will be no point in mining Scrypt cryptos with GPU, but GPU miners will not just stop mining or disappear, they will just move to coins using other different crypto algorithms that will be ASIC proof for now just like LTC was.

Meanwhile the only company that currently ships ASIC devices capable of mining Scrypt cryto currencies is Gridseed and their products are selling a lot. But even these devices may not be so attractive in the second half of the year when we start seeing hundreds of MHS worth of Scryt ASICs getting added to the network hashrate. The good news is that if you get these ASIC devices now you have a very good chance to not only get your investment back, but also to make some good profit.

The Bitcoin Transaction Malleability May Have Nothing to Do With the Missing Coins at MtGox

27, Mar 2014

mtgox-logo

The problems that MtGox had that have led to the exchange shutting down and announcing the disappearance of about 750000 Bitcoins of users from the exchange (about 850000 total) that they have claimed to be stolen due to the Bitcoin Transaction Malleability. Yesterday MtGox has released another official announcement that they are cooperating with the metropolitan police department of Tokyo and that they have provided all of the required records and documents to the police that are required for the ongoing investigation. At the same time a new report made by Christian Decker, Roger Wattenhofer from the ETH Zurich University in Switzerland has concluded that MtGox may have lost just a few hundred Bitcoins due to the transaction malleability and not hundreds of thousands as they claim.

In Bitcoin, transaction malleability describes the fact that the signatures that prove the ownership of bitcoins being transferred in a transaction do not provide any integrity guarantee for the signatures themselves. This allows an attacker to mount a malleability attack in which it intercepts, modifies, and rebroadcasts a transaction, causing the transaction issuer to believe that the original transaction was not confirmed. In February 2014 MtGox, once the largest Bitcoin exchange, closed and filed for bankruptcy claiming that attackers used malleability attacks to drain its accounts. In this work we use traces of the Bitcoin network for over a year preceding the filing to show that, while the problem is real, there was no widespread use of malleability attacks before the closure of MtGox.

The transaction malleability problem is real and should be considered when implementing Bitcoin clients. However, while MtGox claimed to have lost 850,000 bitcoins due to malleability attacks, we merely observed a total of 302,000 bitcoins ever being involved in malleability attacks. Of these, only 1,811 bitcoins were in attacks before MtGox stopped users from withdrawing bitcoins. Even more, 78.64% of these attacks were ineffective. As such, barely 386 bitcoins could have been stolen using malleability attacks from MtGox or from other businesses. Even if all of these attacks were targeted against MtGox, MtGox
needs to explain the whereabouts of 849,600 bitcoins.

Now, MtGox definitely needs to explain how come only 386 Bitcoins could have been stolen using malleability attacks and they claim that about 850000 coins were in fact missing. Did they just find a good excuse to get away with the users Bitcoins or there is something different going on here. We do recommend that you take a look at the report in question.

– To read the full report called Bitcoin Transaction Malleability and MtGox in PDF format…


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