Archive for the ‘General Info’ Category

AMD Radeon RX 480 May Not be That Great for Mining

17, Jun 2016

amd-radeon-rx-470

With less than two weeks left before the official launch date of the highly anticipated AMD Radeon RX 480 GPUs that are supposedly coming out on 29th of June with a recommended price tag of $199 USD people are getting anxious to get their hands on the hardware. The speculations are that the RX 480 will be doing great for mining Ethereum while also being quite power efficient and at the announced price it could be the killer ETH mining choice for multi-GPU mining rigs. So what could potentially make the Radeon RX 480 not so great choice for mining after all when the cards start hitting the market at the end of this month?

When AMD announced that the RX 480 will be priced at $199 USD everybody was surprised by the good news, yes, it is not top model GPU offering the highest performance on the market, but for the expected performance the price was great. Unfortunately with the upcoming release on the market we are hearing some not so good news that will make the RX 480 less attractive choice for mining and it is entirely related to the price point. It seems that the $199 USD price tag was indeed too good to be true, we are hearing from different sources that the actual end user prices will be more like 20-30% higher than that. Furthermore initially the availability of the new GPUs will most likely not be able to match the high demand that it is expected, so in the end it seems not very likely that will be able to get your hands on an RX 480 on 29th for $199 USD.

A few days ago AMD has also announced two lower-end Polaris-based models – the RX 470 and RX 460 GPUs that should be even more affordable and still manage to provide good performance (for gaming that is). What you should be more interested in however is the AMD Radeon RX 470 that is expected to be slightly cut down version of the RX 480 GPU, retaining the same PCB and 256-bit memory bus. So the chances that the RX 470 might be able to perform very similar in terms of performance for Ethereum mining like the RX 480 are pretty good and with the right price it might be even more attractive for crypto miners. However while AMD says that the RX 470 and RX 460 should be available at the same time the RX 480 launches, we expect that they will be a bit late with about a week or two on the market.

The focus of the RX 480 was mostly put on the Ethereum GPU mining, but we are still on the speculation phase and nobody knows for sure how much MHS the new GPUs will be able to provide. What you should also wonder however is how well these new video cards based on the 14nm AMD Polaris architecture will perform in other crypto currency algorithms and not just buy them because of possibly good Ethereum performance. With the recent issue with the DAO and the drop of ETH price this has become even more important and you should not forget that Ethereum will be mineable for probably up to a year more and then will be switching to PoS…

How to Cancel Unconfirmed Bitcoin Transactions

16, Jun 2016

unconfirmed-bitcoin-transaction

With the recent spike in the price of Bitcoin the number of unconfirmed transactions has increased significantly yet again and the Bitcoin blocks are getting closer and closer to being full. This essentially slows down transactions on the network and in order to ensure that your transaction is being processed faster you need to increase the fee over the standard recommended one. While this may be just fine for larger BTC transfers with fewer inputs, if you want to make a small transaction of few Bitcoin cents or a large one with a lot of inputs the network fees can get quite high. If the fee is not large enough and the waiting list is big you can easily end up with your transaction not getting confirmed and included in a block for over a day and that usually causes a problem, especially if you are paying for something in BTC. The solution would be to just cancel any unconfirmed transaction that did not go through for over 24 hours and it is not that hard to do it actually, although the process itself may require some time.

bitcoin-qt-zapwallettxes

Cancelling stuck Bitcoin transaction sent from your local BTC wallet requires you to run the qt wallet client with a special option that would remove all pending transactions that are not included in the blockchain. You need to run bitcoin-qt.exe (or the respective qt executable file depending on the OS you are using) with the -zapwallettxes parameter, but before running it make sure you backup your wallet.dat file. This will take some time as it will initiate a blockchain rescan, so be prepared to wait until the process finishes and do not forget to remove the extra parameter the next time you run your wallet as it is not needed anymore. Reports from Aktien Kaufen und Verkaufen state that as a result you will be able to initiate a new transaction with the unspent coins and by increasing the network fee you pay you should be able to move them faster and have the transaction confirmed this time. You will be essentially double spending your Bitcoins, but the second transaction you initiate will cancel out the earlier one. You cannot successfully double spend Bitcoins unless you control more than half of the Bitcoin network, so no worries here. The only thing you will be able to do is free up your coins that were stuck in an unconfirmed transaction for a long time and then be able to initiate a new transaction to send them successfully this time.

Do note that although we are giving this example for Bitcoin, it should work on many other altcoins as well that are based on a more recent forked Bitcoin wallet code as the option we use here is not included in the earlier version of the Bitcoin client. There are some more complex alternatives for performing the same thing described here if your wallet does not support the zapwallettxes option, so you are not out of luck in such cases either. You can do the same thing with the Python-based tool called Pywallet as an alternative to using the qt wallet method described here.

BitGold Now Accepting Multiple Crypto Currencies

8, Jun 2016

bitgold-main

We have already covered the BitGold service that offers an easy way to acquire Gold and to spend it for everyday payments or store it as an investment and you can also always redeem your gold for cash or have it physically sent to you. The service has had support for purchasing Gold with Bitcoins for quite some time already, but it seems that they have significantly expanded the number of supported crypto currencies that can be used. Below is a list of crypto currencies that are supported by the service for purchasing Gold, but do note that there are some additional limitations associated with Gold purchases using BTC or another cryptocoin.

Supported crypto coins for Gold purchase:
– Bitcoin (BTC)
– BitCrystals (BCY)
– Bitshares (BTS)
– Blackcoin (BLK)
– Clams (CLAM)
– Counterparty (XCP)
– Dash (DASH)
– Digibyte (DGB)
– Dogecoin (DOGE)
– Emercoin (EMC)
– Ether (ETH)
– Factoids (FCT)
– Litecoin (LTC)
– Maidsafe (MAID)
– Mintcoin (MINT)
– Monacoin (MONA)
– Monero (XMR)
– Namecoin (NMC)
– Novacoin (NVC)
– Nubits (NBT)
– Nxt (NXT)
– Peercoin (PPC)
– Reddcoin (RDD)
– Ripple (XRP)
– Shadowcash (SDC)
– Startcoin (START)
– StorjX (SJCX)
– Tether (USDT)
– Vericoin (VRC)
– Vertcoin (VTC)
– Voxels (VOX)

What still seems to be missing and what we want to see in the future is also the option not only to purchase Gold with crypto currencies, but also to withdraw it in BTC or another crypto currency. For the moment you can still only Redeem your gold owned via a bank transfer, to a prepaid card or in a physical form sent to you. You can of course use the Gold Backed Prepaid MasterCard that the service offers to do regular everyday payments just like you can do with any other MasterCard or send Gold to other users by email similar to how PayPal works for money. So pretty much the only thing that the service needs now is to add the ability to convert your Gold to Bitcoin or another crypto currency and have it sent to your digital wallet.

– For more details about the Gold-centered digital payments service BitGold…


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