Archive for the ‘General Info’ Category

litecoin-difficulty-chart

After the recent Litecoin (LTC) block reward halving we’ve seen some drop in the total network hashrate and thus difficulty as well as a direct result from the new lower rewards as a result of mining. The exchange rate of Litecoin did not change much, but with the lower difficulty things were looking like they would balance – smaller reward, but easier to mine. Interestingly enough a few days after the block reward halving the difficulty of LTC has started rising again and has already reached back the level where it was before the halving and it seems that it will continue to rise. This development rises some questions as to what is happening, so that the difficulty is rising and the exchange rate remains the same while the block reward is half of what it was previously. The only reasonable answer would be that somebody is bringing online new generation of more efficient Scrypt ASIC miners, otherwise with old generation hardware a lot of people would be mining LTC at a loss. There are not that many options available, probably SFARDS is stacking up their new SF100 miners for own use in a data center or maybe Innosilicon is ready with their next generation of Scrypt ASIC chips and are doing the same…

ethpool-core-source-code

Etherchain have released an open source implementation of pooled mining for Ethereum. Do note however that this software is not a complete mining pool as it only takes care of work distribution and share validation; valid shares are stored into a local database (LevelDB). Reward calculation and payments are not yet implemented, but it should be possible to integrate this software some of the existing open source mining pools. The current implementation is in Go and it might not be the most effective one, apparently the pool is able to process ~600 workers at 30% CPU utilization (1 core) and 70MB RAM usage. The pool has been tested successfully with both the go Ethereum client (geth) and the cpp Ethereum client (eth) as a backend. And while it may not be a complete implementation with full functionality and web-based interface it is still a good starting point for anyone interested in running a mining pool for Ethereum without having to start from scratch.

For more information about the first open source Ethereum mining pool and the source code…

bitcoin-photo-contest

The European based portal for buying Bitcoins bit4coin is currently running an interesting Bitcoin Photo Contest where you can win up to 1000 Euro as a reward for the first place, 500 Euro for the second and 250 Euro for the third. All you have to do to take part in the contest is to submit a Bitcoin themed photo made by you. The idea is to show interesting, original photographs and artwork by and for the bitcoin community. Examples could be photographs of people using bitcoin, bitcoin spottings at interesting places, or bitcoin paintings. There is no limit to your creativity, as long as it has something to do with bitcoin. The contest is open for submissions at any time until October 15th, 2015. Jury members cast votes until October 21st, and winners will be announced right after.

For additional information about the Bitcoin Photo Contest ran by bit4coin…


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