It Is All About BTC, LTC, ETH, DOGE, KAS mining as well as other alternative crypto currencies
With the release of the latest generations of powerful mining hardware such as the Bitmain AntMiner S7 and Avalon 6 that is available to normal miners and not only to large mining operations along with the increase of the Bitcoin price lately mining for Bitcoin has started to become profitable again. As a direct result of the new hardware getting released and the price increase there was the inevitable total hashrate and thus difficulty increase in the Bitcoin network and that increase has been quite significant. If you take a closer look at how difficulty has risen in the last month and a half or so you will notice that the things have developed quite rapidly with close to 50% increase and the rise will apparently continue with a lot more more new hardware still getting added. So while it is still quite profitable to mine with new hardware such as the latest ASIC miners mentioned above and fast ROI times for these devices the miners with older hardware might already be struggling to make a profit. So you should be careful with making investments in new mining hardware even though at the moment things look quite nice if you do the math.
Do note forget that in a couple of months, roughly this summer, another halving of the Bitcoin reward is expected and even though it will most likely be coming with another significant increase in the price of BTC you should still have it in mind. The current situation on the Chinese financial markets are also significantly influencing the price of Bitcoin with many people saying that the trouble in China are also responsible for many people turning to BTC and thus further increasing the price of the crypto currency. This all means that we have an interesting year ahead of us with many expecting to see Bitcoin price getting back to levels like $1000 USD per BTC when the reward halving occurs and even more by the end of the year. Still this does not mean that there could be some negative surprises as well, so you should be carefully and not rush into buying Bitcoin or getting back into mining it without thinking things through first.
ROKOS is a free Raspbian based OS with integrated Bitcoin support giving you the ability to start your own Full Bitcoin Node or Client in no time on a Raspberry Pi. You just need to download the OS image, write it on an SD card and boot it up on a RPi and you will be ready to run a Bitcoin full node or client in the graphical frontend you will see. Do note that you will need to have a Raspberry Pi B or Pi 2 along with 8gb SD card for the OS and an external device like a big US stick to store the Bitcoin blockchain on (128GB is a good choise). The ROKOS is currently available in only one Core version with support for Bitcoin, but the developers behind the project do plan to release ROKOS Flavours that will bring support for different altcoins as well. ROKOS is a good way for users that already have some unused RPi hardware and want to support the network by providing additional full nodes.
– For more details about the ROKOS Core for Raspberry Pi-based Bitcoin support…
In the last few months things with the crypto currency exchange Cryptsy haven’t been good at all, there have been a lot of complains from users that they cannot withdraw their coins and the support is not responding to them for days or solving their issues at all. Updates from Cryptsy regarding issues and user complaints haven’t been good either with mostly some reports claiming that the problems are caused by various technical issues. Users however are still reporting that they are not able to withdraw coins, mostly BTC, but others as well in either large or small amounts and thus concerns are rising about the future of the exchange. There are already speculations that Cryptsy is following in the footsteps of MtGox and it is just a matter of time before everything falls down. The exchange is reporting that the last 24 hour volume is about 264 BTC, so apparently quite a few users are still using it, but we would still advice you to try to get your coins out of the exchange if you have not initiated withdraws yet while you still might actually get something out. Some users had more success converting BTCs to other crypto coins and then withdrawing altocoins instead of directly withdrawing in Bitcoin, so you might try using multiple currencies and in multiple transactions to move any coins you might have in Cryptsy. We have not personally used Cryptsy for quite some time as there have been a lot of other more user friendly and problem free altcoin exchanges available for a while already…