Dash Block Size Increase to 2 MB Has Been Accepted

22 Jan
2016

dash-logo

While the Bitcoin debate around the block size continues the alternative crypt currency Dash, formerly known as DarkCoin, has shown how a consensus about an increase of the block size can be reached quickly and efficiently. By holding a vote among its stakeholders to increase its blocksize, even if there is not yet immediate need of such an increase, from 1 MB to 2 MB a consensus has been reached within 24 hours with 99 percent of the vote for the increase. Currently each block of Dash contains less than 10 transactions on average and is justa few kilobytes in size, so there is not much need of 2 MB block size, however with the developers expecting the blocksize to grow over time the need for further increase in the not so near future can be avoided (learning from Bitcoin).

According to Coinmarketcap Dash is currently the 5th crypto currency in terms of Market Cap, however you can also say it is the third one after BTC and LTC if you take out Ripple and Ethereum due to the first being pre-mined completely and the second one with a very large initial pre-mine. Dash has some interesting and useful advantages as compared ot Bitcoin and some other crypto currencies including much faster transaction times, offering more anonymity and still being mined with GPUs only (no ASICs) using the popular X11 algorithm. Lately there have been some interesting and positive news regarding Dash that have also resulted in the price of the altcoin increasing a bit in the last few days.

MiningSweden and the Expected Extra Payment for VIP Shares

21 Jan
2016

mining-sweden

The Bitcoin cloud mining service MiningSweden is now almost one year old now, though we have started testing and using the service back in May last year. The interesting thing about the company is that it offers two types of the so called mining shares that get you Bitcoin cloud mining hashrate – standard and VIP shares. The slightly more expensive VIP shares are supposed to provide users with extra profit based on the number of shares owned and the total profit of the company behind the project, besides the standard cloud mining hashrate that brings you mining profits. The extra payment that the VIP shares will bring their owners is supposed to be paid after the end of March when the company will close the business year and its profits will be calculated. So payments will be sent to VIP share owners in April most likely and we are going to finally see how the extra investment for VIP shares will pay out over the standard mined coins we got from the cloud mining hashrate.

Meanwhile there are still more VIP shares available (over forty thousand) from the total of 100K that were supposed to be available and sold to users, so you can buy not only standard mining shares with 20 GHS cloud mining hashrate per share for $9.69 USD at the moment, but also VIP shares in promotional multiple packs. You can currently get 1 VIP share along with 10 GHS cloud mining hashrate for $6.90 USD, pack of 10 VIP shares with 100 GHS for $68.25 USD, pack of 50 VIP shares with 500 GHS for $325 USD or 100 VIP shares with 1000 GHS for $614 USD. So far our experience using the service has been one of the most problem free and pleasant ones among all cloud mining services that we have tried, so we would recommend to check out the service if you have not done so. The only thing that we have found somewhat lacking is the lack of more regular information and updates with news, something that is somewhat of a general problem for many such services.

– For more information about the service and to start cloud mining Bitcoins with Mining Sweden…

Building an 8 TB Storage Solution for Storj’s DriveShare

20 Jan
2016

driveshare-earnings-calculator

Recently we have tried the beta of the latest Version of Storj DriveShare GUI, a service that is intended to allow you to earn money by sharing your extra hard drive space. Although it is still not ready to be launched and you could have some issues getting to try it out, this Blockchain-based cloud storage service does look very promising. While participating in the currently ongoing beta test of the DriveShare service we’ve went on to figure out how to easily build a reliable and affordable 8TB home storage solution that can be used with the service for earning money via the Storjcoin X (SJCX) crypto currency tokens that Storj uses. Going through the earnings calculator that estimates how much can you earn sharing 8 TB of storage via the service we are getting over $230 USD estimate per month if all of the space is being used by users of the service, so it is not a guarantee that you will be earning this much for sure. So our goal was to build 8 TB storage solution with less than what you can earn in 6 months based on the earnings estimate or with other words less than $1380 USD.

8-tb-hp-microserver

Going through various small home NAS (Network Attached Storage) solutions and different small server data storage solutions we have found out an interesting choice that is compact, affordable and easy to be used by not so advanced users – the HP ProLiant MicroServer. More specifically the HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 G1610T 1P 4GB-U B120i Non-hot Plug SATA Server(819185-001) that is available for a about $450 USD and that only needs you to install hard drives and do the software setting up like you would with a normal PC. The MicroServer comes with 4GB of memory and a Dual-Core Intel Celeron G1610T processor, along with Gigabit network support and 4 drive bays for hard drives.

The hardware specs of the MicroServer should be more than enough for this kind of a storage solution, so all we need now are four hard drives with 2 TB capacity each for a total of 8 TB capacity. You could go for larger capacity HDDs, however the larger the capacity, the higher the price per drive will be, so at the moment 2 Terabytes offers a good price/capacity ratio and since we have 4 drive bays we can go for 4x 2 TB without having to worry about anything. There are two good options available for the hard drives, the Western Digital Red hard drives with 2 TB going for $90 USD per drive or the 2 TB Red Pro drives for $134 USD per drive. The normal Red series is intended for smaller NAS solutions, offers a bit slower performance and comes with 3 years warranty for a lower price and the Red Pro series is for more serious storage solutions with 5 years warranty, better performance and extra technologies for better reliability. So with 4x 2 TB Red drives we need to spend $360 USD for HDDs and with 4x 2 TB Red Pro drives you need to spend $536 USD or along with the HP MicroServer the total would be either $810 USD or $986 USD. Both choices would put us below the 6 month earnings estimate from DriveShare, so our goal is achieved. Now all that we need is the the service to finish testing and launch in order for such a solution to become interesting alternative to crypto currency mining by offering a home storage solution.

– For more details about the Storj’s DriveShare storage project currently in beta…

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