bitcoinwisdom-difficulty-chart

With the release of the latest generations of powerful mining hardware such as the Bitmain AntMiner S7 and Avalon 6 that is available to normal miners and not only to large mining operations along with the increase of the Bitcoin price lately mining for Bitcoin has started to become profitable again. As a direct result of the new hardware getting released and the price increase there was the inevitable total hashrate and thus difficulty increase in the Bitcoin network and that increase has been quite significant. If you take a closer look at how difficulty has risen in the last month and a half or so you will notice that the things have developed quite rapidly with close to 50% increase and the rise will apparently continue with a lot more more new hardware still getting added. So while it is still quite profitable to mine with new hardware such as the latest ASIC miners mentioned above and fast ROI times for these devices the miners with older hardware might already be struggling to make a profit. So you should be careful with making investments in new mining hardware even though at the moment things look quite nice if you do the math.

Do note forget that in a couple of months, roughly this summer, another halving of the Bitcoin reward is expected and even though it will most likely be coming with another significant increase in the price of BTC you should still have it in mind. The current situation on the Chinese financial markets are also significantly influencing the price of Bitcoin with many people saying that the trouble in China are also responsible for many people turning to BTC and thus further increasing the price of the crypto currency. This all means that we have an interesting year ahead of us with many expecting to see Bitcoin price getting back to levels like $1000 USD per BTC when the reward halving occurs and even more by the end of the year. Still this does not mean that there could be some negative surprises as well, so you should be carefully and not rush into buying Bitcoin or getting back into mining it without thinking things through first.

rokos-bitcoin-core

ROKOS is a free Raspbian based OS with integrated Bitcoin support giving you the ability to start your own Full Bitcoin Node or Client in no time on a Raspberry Pi. You just need to download the OS image, write it on an SD card and boot it up on a RPi and you will be ready to run a Bitcoin full node or client in the graphical frontend you will see. Do note that you will need to have a Raspberry Pi B or Pi 2 along with 8gb SD card for the OS and an external device like a big US stick to store the Bitcoin blockchain on (128GB is a good choise). The ROKOS is currently available in only one Core version with support for Bitcoin, but the developers behind the project do plan to release ROKOS Flavours that will bring support for different altcoins as well. ROKOS is a good way for users that already have some unused RPi hardware and want to support the network by providing additional full nodes.

For more details about the ROKOS Core for Raspberry Pi-based Bitcoin support…

amazon-de-coinimal

European users have another interesting opportunity to purchase using Bitcoin from the German Amazon store thanks to the Austrian bitcoin start-up Coinimal. The service originally allowed users to buy crypto currencies or sell them and transfer the money via a SEPA bank transfer in Europe or to convert Bitcoin and send the money in your PayPal account, something that we have tested and can confirm works pretty well.

You can now also receive Amazon.de vouchers in exchange for your Bitcoins with the process apparently being entirely automatic. You need to send BTC to Coinimal, and after just 1 to 3 blockchain confirmations you should receive a voucher code immediately by email and there should be no fees at all for the conversion. You will be getting a standard Amazon.de voucher to top up your Amazon.de balance, which can be redeemed against purchases on the marketplace of the German Amazon making it possible to buy absolutely anything on Amazon.de for Bitcoin. For this service no verification is required, with only an email address, any customers should be able to purchase up to €5000 EURO of Amazon.de vouchers per day (€25 minimum order).

If you want to check out the Coinimal Bitcoin to Amazon.de voucher service yourself…

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