Archive for the ‘Tests and Reviews’ Category

Bitcoin Debit Cards Now Available from Bitwala

15, Dec 2015

bitwala

The European company Bitwala that provides services for paying bills by transferring Bitcoin to fiat and more recently started offering BTC to PayPal transfers has added a new service – Bitcoin-powered Debit Cards. According to the service the cards should be already available for “Tier 2 verified” customers in the form of a physical or a virtual debit card nominated in Euro. You can order a virtual Bitcoin debit card for 5 EURO or a physical card for 10 Euro with the regular 0.5% percent fee of the service and funds should be credited on the card up 3 business days and often a lot faster according to the information available (during work days it should not take more than a few hours). This means that similar to their BTC to PayPal service the transfer of Bitcoins to your BTC powered debit card will not be immediate and this in the world of crypto currencies is a serious issue. When you want to spend Bitcoins through a debit card that is powered by BTC you will normally want to be able to immediately spend the coins as fiat and not having to wait for up to a few days. Thee are already alternatives for Bitcoin debit cards that we have tried and that offer users to immediately spend their available coins in a wallet or loaded to the card as fiat such as Xapo Bitcoin Debit Card or E-coin Bitcoin Debit Card. Though having more alternatives and different options can be helpful at times, especially in the world of crypto currencies, so this is one more option for a Bitcoin debit card that you can have.

– For more information about Bitwala and to try out the service yourself…

First Impressions from the E-Coin Physical Bitcoin Debit Card

9, Dec 2015

e-coin-bitcoin-visa-debit-card

A few days ago we have talked about the E-Coin Bitcoin Debit Card and meanwhile we have also received our physical Bitcoin debit card from the service and have tried it out already. Prior to that we were using a virtual Bitcoin powered debit card that is also being offered by the service, a product that is good only for online payments, but you get it almost immediately and it offers you an easy way to spend Bitcoin at places that do not directly accept BTC payments. But back on the physical Bitcoin powered card that we got from the service, to our surprise it was not branded plastics like the images shown on the official website, instead it comes with a default prepaid Visa debit card design that is supplied by the card partner that is used – in this case it is My Choice – the same partner that Xapo uses for their online Bitcoin-powered cars as well.

bitcoin-debit-card-loading-btc

The E-Coin virtual and physical Bitcoin-powered VISA debit cards do have a separate balance than your balance in the online wallet you also get when you register for the service. This means that once you have some BTC in your E-Coin online wallet they will not be immediately available for use in your Bitcoin debit card, you will have to load some of the coins in the card’s balance in order to be able to use them. This allows you to move only a certain amount of coins in your card whenever you want to make a payment with the amount you need to pay, unlike with the Xapo card where the wallet balance is directly available for use with the card as well. Do note that sending BTC to your E-Coin wallet requires at least 3 network confirmations for the coins to be credited in the wallet and then you can immediately move some of these coins or all of them to the card “loading it” without further waiting time, though these seems to be some small fee for the transfer to the card that you are being charged. When you load the card with BTC you set the amount in coins that you already have in your online wallet an they are being converted to the currency that the card is in such as EURO for example based on the current exchange rate. So you exchange the coins to fiat money when you load the card with the current exchange rate unlike with Xapo for example where the conversion happens when you are actually making the payment from the card.

– For more information about the E-Coin Virtual and Physical Bitcoin-powered Debit Cards…

EVGA GTX 750 Ti With Different Versions of ccMiner SPMOD

3, Dec 2015

gtx-750-ti-ccminer-spmod

Recently we have picked up the last 20 releases of the ccMiner SPMOD fork for Maxwell and tested them on a Gigabyte GTX 970 WF3 GPU. running at stock frequencies to see what has happened with the hashrate in the X11, Quark, NeoScrypt and LyraREv2 algorithms. There were users that wanted us to repeat the same test with a GTX 750 Ti GPU, so we have picked up an eVGA GeForce GTX 750 Ti video card and repeated the same tests. The first version we tested with ccMiner 1.5.53-git SP is from early July and looking at the results it seems that the most notable improvement is with Quark as well as some slight improvement with X11. Lyra2REv2 support has been added in release ccMiner 1.5.60-git SP, so there are no results prior to that, it seems however that the initial versions and the last one have pretty much the same hashrate with some drop with some in-between versions. The NeoScrypt hashrate hasn’t changed much, there is some slight variance with different versions probably due to the Boost frequency of the GPU variating a bit. Do note that these are results with publicly available and open source code, there could be some higher performance private miners also available and you might be able to squeeze more performance with different intensity settings (other than the default ones) as well as by overclocking the video card.


top