Archive for the ‘General Info’ Category

JoyStream Combines P2P File Sharing and Bitcoin

17, Jun 2015

The video above shows a proof of concept demonstration of the soon to be released JoyStream BitTorrent client, a interesting approach for combining P2P file sharing using Torrent files with Bitcoin payments for both people sharing files and people downloading files. And while it all seems promising, the concept still needs to be be packaged in a complete ecosystem where the needed content will be provided and paid for by users needing it. So far it all seems like a good and apparently working implementation on the software side for the actual P2P file sharing and Bitcoin integration in the process. Still the project is worth keeping an eye on as it soon promises to have an alpha release to be tested on the BitCoin testnet and you can sing up for an early access if you are interested.

– Visit the official website of the JoyStream project for additional information about the concept…

Bter Investment Plan With 10% Yearly Interest Rate

15, Jun 2015

bter-investment-plan

The Asian crypto currency exchange Bter has made available to its users an Investment Plan opportunity, in partnership with the JUA, giving users 10% yearly interest rate for Bitcoins held in their accounts. You need to enroll into the Investment plan to have the BTC in your account bring you interest rate and the good thing is that your coins do not get locked up, you can still trade with them or withdraw them at any time. The interest rate is being paid on a daily basis, depending on the balance you have available with the current early interest rate at 10.52%. Bter is able to offer this in partnership with JUA, a large scale mining farm operator, as apparently the funds are used as investment in JUA’s farms and the interest is provided by the mined coins. It is pretty much the same principle used by the HaoBTC online wallet service, but here you get paid a slightly higher interest rate on a daily basis and you can use the coins to trade in the exchange making some more extra profit.

– To check out Bter’s Investment Plan with 10% yearly Interest Rate on your BTC balance…

What to Expect from the Coming Soon New AMD GPUs

15, Jun 2015

amd-fiji-fury-gpu-hbm

There is already a lot of speculation about the new AMD GPUs that are supposed to be announced in the next week or so and among all of the unofficial information there is probably a lot that will end up being the truth. So far it seems that apart from the new high-end Fiji GPUs that will use High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) all others will be a refresh of the currently available generation with maybe a bit more shaders or a bit wider memory bus, so you should probably not expect too much out of the net 300 series. The big question is about what level of performance the new AMD Fury video cards based on the Fiji GPU with HBM will be offering. AMD has been hinting that they are targeting a level of performance comparable to that of Nvidia Titan X, but it is not only abut performance, but also about power usage when talking about crypto currency mining and then there is also the cost of the video card. So if the Fiju GPUs that are to be used in the AMD Fury video cards are able to achieve similar performance with a bit higher power usage, but at a significantly better price they may end up be quite interesting. Especially if they do come with a water cooling solution already installed on them, ensuring cool and silent operation – perfect for GPU mining.

However we doubt that the price will be much lower than that of a Titan X and that will make it a bit too expensive for use for crypto mining, just like is the case with the Titan. On the other hand Nvidia has recently released the more affordable and slightly stripped down version of the Titan X in the form of GTX 980 Ti. The good news based on our initial testing was that the GTX 980 Ti was offering a performance very close to that of the Titan X at a much better price making it the more interesting choice for crypto currency mining, especially if you get the card as a gaming / crypto mining solution (mining while not using it for gaming). There is also already some talk that AMD will have two models based on their new Fiji GPU with HBM memory available, so the possibility to get one that will compete with GTX 980 Ti and one that will compete with the Titan X is actually quite high. Based on past experience with AMD GPU mining however it may take some time and maybe some tweaks to optimize the existing OpenCL miners to take full advantage of the new GPUs (not the refresh models). That is especially true considering that the open source miner development for AMD GPUs hasn’t been that active lately, unlike the developers of open source miners for Nvidia GPUs that are doing great job in optimizing and fixing issues constantly. Hopefully the new releases from AMD will finally spark some recovery in the AMD GPU mining ecosystem, well we are going to see pretty soon…


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