Archive for the ‘General Info’ Category

Bitcoin Basketball Android Game With Bitcoin Rewards

26, Sep 2015

The Android mobile game developer Bitplay.Today has released a new free competitive multiplayer game that awards players with Bitcoins, the new game is called Bitcoin Basketball. The goal of the game is to make as much points as possible for a given time period and with a limited number of basketball balls and since you are competing with other real people based on your points ranking the first three places out of four get Bitcoin rewards. Bitcoin Basketball is very easy to play – simply drag your finger and aim your shot, release and score points, but keep in mind there is wind that makes it a bit more challenging to hit the shot. This is essentially the fourth game from that developer based on the similar concept of mini tournaments against other real people and with Bitcoin rewards. You will not get rich with BTC playing these games, but if you have some time to waste they can still be fun to play and you can get some satoshi while doing so. The previous similar game from the same developer was Bitcoin Hopper and prior to that there were also Bitcoin Crush and Bitcoin Flapper and you might want to check them out as well if you still haven’t.

– For more details about the game Bitcoin Basketball on the Google Play Store…

Weipool Has Released the Source of Their Ethereum Mining Pool

23, Sep 2015

weipool-front-page

Suddenly it became much easier to start your own mining pool for Ethereum or any of the forks that it already has thanks to Weipool who have released their full pool source code. You can find the source code of the pool backend, it is relying on geth as an Ethereum client as well as the source code of the pool frontend. Aside from the Geth Ethereum client the pool software needs Redis and Node.js, there isn’t much documentation available, but you should be able to quickly figure things out. The front-end is pretty basic, so you might want to make it a bit more prettier and more functional, but other than that you should be able to have a basic pool up and running in no time. You can visit Weipool for a working example of the code, unfortunately the pools itself has not managed to attract a lot of miners and keep them there, even though it was announced when there were not that much pools for Ethereum available.

Litecoin (LTC) Hashrate Analysis Post Halving

19, Sep 2015

official-litecoin-logo

Charlie Lee, the creator of of the popular alternative crypto currency Litecoin, has posted on Reddit a short and interesting analysis on why a few weeks after the first block reward halving the difficulty and price of LTC has returned to the level it was prior to the event. Below you can find his post quoted:

After the halving one would expect that either the price will go up or the hashrate must drop. This is because mining is designed with a Nash equilibrium of miner profit reaching 0 over time. So if miners are running at near 0 profit, and suddenly their revenue gets cut in half, miners would need to turn off their machines unless they are willing to mine at a loss.

The halving happened, and the price stayed the same. The hashrate dropped a little but then climbed back up pretty quickly to the previous level. That’s really unexpected, but I think I have an explanation. I talked to some Chineses miners at Scaling Bitcoin and learned something interesting. Most miners have found electricity for free or close to 0 cost. Chinese hydro power plants are sometimes generating too much electricity. That electricity goes to waste if it’s unused. So these plants have either sold the electricity for near 0-cost or they have partnered with miners to give them free electricity for a revenue share.

So this makes total sense now. If the electricity is free or close to 0 cost, then there’s no reason for miners to shut down their machines. They make half as much, but still profitable. These miners have also been asking around at the conference to try to buy old outdated Bitcoin/Litecoin ASICs. With 0-cost electricity, they can keep those machines running and still make money.

We considered the possibility that the reason behind was the introduction of newer generation of Scrypt ASIC miners from SFARDS and Innosilicon and the companies making them stacking up on hardware in their own mining data centers. But the possibility of a lot of Asian miners with zero cost to very very very cheap electricity mining with whatever hardware they can get and still profiting also sounds like a good enough reason. If that ends up being the actual reason it presents a bit of a problem for the normal home miners and small mining operations based outside of Asia that still need to pay for electricity and thus have higher cost for mining and smaller to no profit at all…


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