The Official Litecoin.com Website Has Been Compromised

9 May
2016

litecoin-com-hacked

It seems that the official Litecoin.com website has been hacked and was serving virus-infected downloads, so if you have downloaded something from there in the last few weeks you might want to take some action in order to avoid loss of coins. Do note that the other official website where most people download their LTC wallet software Litecoin.org has not been affected and there should be no problems if you have downloaded anything from it in the last few weeks. Below is the official announcement about the issue with the .COM website.

Litecoin.com was compromised: between 31st of March and 18th of April, and has been compromised until today. The site was serving virus-infected downloads for Windows and OSX using a Javascript injection. The attack happened due to a configuration error with the database, allowing someone to enter malicious JS into the template.

ANYONE WHO HAS DOWNLOADED FROM LITECOIN.COM IN THE PAST 2 WEEKS (not litecoin.org) SHOULD MOVE THEIR COINS TO SOMEWHERE SAFE, AND WIPE THEIR COMPUTERS ASAP – most anti-virus don’t detect it!

Please remember ​to change ALL PASSWORDS​ ASAP, as the attacker may have stolen them from you.

It seems that the issue with the Litecoin.com website has been resolved and the site is already back online.

Nvidia Introducing The GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070

8 May
2016

nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080

Nvidia has announced the first GPUs from their next generation of consumer 16nm FinFET GPUs using the Pascal architecture including some specifications and new features along with the prices and release dates. As expected the new GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 GPUs will be clocked higher and at the same time will consume less power and provide users with more power for the next generation of higher resolution displays an VR for examples. The big question for us however is how the new GPUs will be performing for crypto currency mining as compared to the current generation of Maxwell-based GPUs. The increase of performance combined with lower power usage of the new Pascal models as compared to the current Maxwell video cards is a promising start for sure. We’ll have to wait a bit more in order to see, the GeForce GTX 1080 is going to be available starting May 27th with a price of $599 USD and the GeForce GTX 1070 is coming two weeks later on June 10th with a price of $379 USD. Of course for miners with multi-GPU mining rigs the GTX 1070 would probably be the more interesting product…

– For more details on what to expect from the new Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 and 1070 GPUs…

The Current State of X11 ASIC Miners and the X11 Market

8 May
2016

ibelink-asic-profitability

If you are in the market for X11 ASICs then you might want to reconsider as the profitability at the moment is nothing like when the first batch of iBeLink X11 miners started shipping. Now iBeLink is shipping to customers their second batch with a limit of up to 3 miners per customer and PinIdea, another company also started shipping their faster and more power efficient miners (1 per customer), though they had some shipping issues, so there could be delays. Later this month, apart from the large 384 MHS ASIC from iBeLink and the 500 MHS from PinIdea, we are waiting the release of smaller single chip USB X11 ASIC miners from PinIdea in the range of about 8 MHS per device to help the decentralization.

On the image above is a quick check of the current profit for miners using X11 ASICs from iBeLink, selling your hashrate is still the most profitable, but not by much compared to directly mining for DASH. You are going to be getting about 0.05 BTC or about $25 USD or about 3.5 DASH per day with that X11 ASIC at today’s rates, but you can expect that the profit will go down with more mining hardware becoming available.

pinidea-asic-profitability

This is the situation with the faster and more power efficient X11 ASIC miner from PinIdea, faster and more energy efficient, but also more expensive to purchase. You can expect to get about 0.65 BTC or about $32 USD or about 4.6 DASH per day with that X11 ASIC miner at today’s rates and the numbers will also go down with more miners getting released.

The problem with the release of a lot of X11 ASIC mining hardware is that the X11 market is still relatively small with only Dash having a very strong and big network at the moment and not that many “big” X11 other altcoins, not that many in overall as well. As a result in the short term we might see a decline in the profitability for X11 especially with more big ASIC miners coming online and even though GPU miners would start moving away from X11 you should still carefully consider to invest or not in X11 ASIC hardware at the moment. On the long term however we expect to see the transition of X11 from GPUs to ASIC miners and though it may be a bumpy road, hopefully things will not get out of hand and a lot of X11 hashrate getting centralized in the hands of few essentially leading to the loss of user interest in everything X11 and coins forking to other algorithms.

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