Purchasing Games from Steam with Bitcoin is Quick and Easy

25 Feb
2017

If you did not know Steam has introduced support for online game purchases with Bitcoin in April last year, allowing users of the crypto currency to quickly and easily spend it for software. The payment processor that Valve is using for accepting Bitcoin payments is BitPay. We have recently tried purchasing some games with Bitcoin from Steam and were pleasantly surprised by the experience we’ve had…

Once you select Bitcoin as the payment method you are presented with a QR code to scan to do a payment with a mobile device or you can just copy and paste the BTC address and the amount of coins you need to send to complete the payment. You have 15 minutes to initiate the transaction and as soon as you send the coins and the transaction gets broadcasted over the network the payment is accepted, no need to wait for a minimum of 6 confirmations or anything like that. Really quick and easy to pay with Bitcoin for games on Steam and then you can just go on playing them, so if you still haven’t tried paying with Bitcoin then you might want to give it a try.

Trying Crypto Mining with a Dual CPU E5 Second Hand Servers

22 Feb
2017

The enterprise segment is constantly upgrading their hardware and this fuels the second hand market with interesting and very affordable yet pretty powerful hardware that can also be used for crypto mining. The latest wave of hardware getting replaced and available at a really affordable prices are the first generation of Intel 2011 E5 dual CPU Xeon workstations and servers. This means that you are able to easily acquire a very nicely priced second had server system with two 8-core processors such as Intel Xeon E5-2650 v1 getting 16 physical or 32 logical cores with Hyper Threading. The big question here however is if systems like that that may be acquired cheap are really worth using for crypto mining as they only come with a lot of CPU power, but no GPU capable of being used for mining as for server needs not much GPU power is required generally. We have picked up one such cheap systems off eBay with dual Xeon E5-2650 processors and put it through some benchmarks to gent a better idea on what to expect…

Currently it seems that the only worthwhile CPU-based algorithm to check is the CryptoNight and using the what seems to be the fastest CPU software available at the moment – the XMR-Stak CPU Miner for Monero (XMR). Running the XMR-Stak miner on all 32 logical cores has managed to get us an average hashrate of about 523 HS (hashes per second). The result may not seem that bad for CPU mining, considering that it is a bit slower than a single high-end GPU and the power used by the system is about 150 Watts, so again similar to a more recent higher-end GPU.

We need to run the numbers through an XMR mining calculator and doing just that on Cryptocompare shows that we are actually going to be mining with profit, but the profit isn’t going to be that much. With the current rate it would take a couple of years just to earn back what we have paid for the hardware itself. Not very interesting to CPU mine with such a system, but this is just at the moment, with some new and interesting developments for coins that are only CPU mineable appearing things might look very different… especially if you get a couple of these dual CPU systems to have handy. For the moment however you might want to check them out if you have some other computational needs than crypto mining as the price they can be acquired for is really attractive and again they are still pretty powerful as far as CPU performance goes.

Use the sgminer 5.6.0 Nicehash Fork for X11-Gost (SIBCoin) Mining

17 Feb
2017

At the moment Nvidia GPU miners have the advantage for mining X11-Gost with a faster hashrate for the more recent Maxwell and Pascal GPUs than AMD miners. Still AMD miners might be interested in checking out the X11-Gost algorithm used by SIBCoin (SIB) as it is not that power hungry and with the increased interest with the recent addition of the algorithm on NiceHash as it might offer a nice profitability for users willing to sell their hashrate and get paid in Bitcoins directly.

So if you are using AMD GPU mining rigs you might want to check out X11-Gost on NiceHash using the latest sgminer 5.6.0 Nicehash Fork (source). We are seeing a hasrate of between 7 MH/s and 8 MH/s on stock Radeon RX 480 and while still slower than about 11 MH/s on a stock Nvidia GTX 1070 the fact that the algorithm is not that power demanding and you can use lower power for the GPUs may make it attractive for some users, so do give it a try. Older generation of AMD GPUs may not be the best choice for this algorithm performance wise and the same pretty much goes for older Nvidia GPUs, but for AMD Polaris and Nvidia Maxwell and Pascal it is.

– To download the latest sgminer 5.6.0 Nicehash Fork for Windows OS (32-bit)…

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