Security Breach on Bitfinex, Trading Was Halted

2 Aug
2016

bitfinex-logo

The crypto currency exchange Bitfinex has officially announced that it has experienced a security breach and as a result had to halt trading and stop access for everyone until the situation is resolved. As a result of the hack it seems that the funds of some users of the exchange have been stolen, but nobody knows how bad the situation was apparently. The markets have immediately responded with a sharp drop of the Bitcoin price, a further drop of the already declining BTC exchange rate in the last days…

Below is a quote of the official announcement about the security breach at Bitfinex:

Today we discovered a security breach that requires us to halt all trading on Bitfinex, as well as halt all digital token deposits to and withdrawals from Bitfinex.

We are investigating the breach to determine what happened, but we know that some of our users have had their bitcoins stolen. We are undertaking a review to determine which users have been affected by the breach. While we conduct this initial investigation and secure our environment, bitfinex.com will be taken down and the maintenance page will be left up.

The theft is being reported to — and we are co-operating with — law enforcement.

As we account for individualized customer losses, we may need to settle open margin positions, associated financing, and/or collateral affected by the breach. Any settlements will be at the current market prices as of 18:00 UTC. We are taking this necessary accounting step to normalize account balances with the objective of resuming operations. We will look at various options to address customer losses later in the investigation. While we are halting all operations at this time, we can confirm that the breach was limited to bitcoin wallets; the other digital tokens traded on Bitfinex are unaffected.

We will post updates as and when appropriate on our status page, bitfinex.statuspage.io. We are deeply concerned about this issue and we are committing every resource to try to resolve it. We ask for the community’s patience as we unravel the causes and consequences of this breach.

Another Ethereum Fork in the Making – Classic Ethereum (CETH)

2 Aug
2016

ethereum-logo

A post on reddit has bee published today that introduces Classic Ethereum (CETH) – another Ethereum (ETH) for that is apparently in the making at the moment. Just like Ethereum Classic (ETC) the new Classic Ethereum (CETH) fork will follow the original Ethereum blockchain until the controversial block 1920000 where it will fork with a small signature change to make replay attacks impossible. We are going to see how this will affect things and if it may make them even worse than they are at the moment or instead will help. The current Ethereum situation where ETC is causing more issues than helping driven by the greed for making money from “free coins” and hurting different members of the crypto ecosystem with the use and misuse of replay attacks. We are going to be following the development of the situation with new fork Classic Ethereum (CETH)…

– To check out the official introduction of the new Classic Ethereum (CETH) fork posted on reddit…

Expected Ethereum Hashrate of the New AMD Radeon RX 470 GPUs

2 Aug
2016

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The new AMD Radeon RX 470 GPUs are supposed to start hitting the market in a few days and since their bigger brother – the RX 480 has turned out to be a good choice for Ethereum mining, although it did not perform that good in other algorithms, people are interested in how well the RX 470 does. We got a tip from a reader that apparently has an RX 470 8GB video card in his hands already and along with the information that was sent there was also a screenshot included to show the Ethereum mining performance he is getting.

The hashrate at stock settings for the GPU shows 24.5-24.6 MHS mining with Claymore’s Dual Miner (only for ETH) and this is pretty much what the Radeon RX 480 does with the default settings. So it seems that the slightly lower number of Stream Processors in the RX 470 did not result is drop of hashrate at least for mining Ethereum (ETH) as it is a more memory intensive algorithm, do note however that it should affect performance in other more GPU-intensive algorithms. Unfortunately we don’t yet have any information regarding the performance of the RX 470 in other algorithms, but we should in a couple of days when we manage to get our hands on the new AMD video cards.

Do note however that there is a catch in this result being the same as on Radeon RX 480, the reason for the same Ethereum mining hashrate hides in the video memory. As we mentioned the results shown on the screenshot are from an 8 GB model of RX 480 that apparently has the video memory running at 8 GHz (the same as on RX 480 8GB models), so the same performance is to be expected. There will however be AMD Radeon RX 470 GPUs with 4GB of video memory where the operating frequency could vary between 6.6 GHz and 7 GHz and these should have lower performance for Ethereum. The expected hashrate in mining Ethereum is more like around 20 MHS for the 6.6 GHz video memory and about 21 MHS for the 7 GHz models.

So should you buy RX 470 8GB models with 8 GHz memory instead of RX 480 8GB models with 8 GHZ video memory if you are interested in mining Ethereum, Ethereum Classic or another crypto currency that uses ethash-based algorithm? Don’t be in a hurry to do so, because while most RX 480 cards with 8 GHz video memory could easily hit 8.8 GHz or 9 GHz with overclock it is highly likely that the RX 470 cards could be more limited in their overclock capabilities. Another thing to note is the price difference between the RX 470 and RX 480 for the 8GB models with 8 GHz video memory, if it is not big enough the 480 could remain the better choice.

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