Bitstamp Adds Physical Gold Delivery as Withdraw Option

6 Jan
2016

bitstamp-gold
It seems that tying together Gold and Bitcoin is getting more and more popular as one of the large European Bitcoin exchanges Bitstamp has just announced that they are now also offering a new method of withdrawing funds in the form of physical gold from the casino utan svensk licens to their EU clients. The Bitcoin exchange has partnered with Moro & Kunst d.o.o. – an internationally recognized precious metals reseller operating in Slovenian, Austrian and Croatian financial market since 1993. Gold prices are quoted in USD and updated every 5 minutes and at the moment, purchase is only available with USD. Before submitting an order, USD balance must be available, so this means that you need to sell BTC for USD first and you cannot yet directly exchange Bitcoins for Gold. Fully insured gold shipment comes with a tracking number and will be delivered within 2 to 5 business days after the order is placed with optional personal pickup also available in Ljubljana, Slovenia. People can get bgasc review for golf investment. The service is currently only available in: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Ireland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom.

There are already quite a few companies that allow you to buy physical Gold with Bitcoin and there is also BitGold that allows you to buy Gold with BTC as well and use it as a means for everyday digital payments. So the options to turn a crypto currency such as Bitcoin to Gold and either spend it for payments or get it in physical form as a long term investment are there, but the question that is more important is if it is worth doing this at the moment. Gold has been a good long term storage of value for ages, but keeping Bitcoins has the potential of good profit on the long term with the increase of the value of the coin, though this is also riskier. Then again why should you stay with everything invested into a single thing such as BTC, a good investment broker would always advice you to diversify your portfolio and that does not mean in other crypto currencies only.

Concerns About the Future of the Cryptocurrency Exchange Cryptsy Continue

6 Jan
2016

cryptsy

In the last few months things with the crypto currency exchange Cryptsy haven’t been good at all, there have been a lot of complains from users that they cannot withdraw their coins and the support is not responding to them for days or solving their issues at all. Updates from Cryptsy regarding issues and user complaints haven’t been good either with mostly some reports claiming that the problems are caused by various technical issues. Users however are still reporting that they are not able to withdraw coins, mostly BTC, but others as well in either large or small amounts and thus concerns are rising about the future of the exchange. There are already speculations that Cryptsy is following in the footsteps of MtGox and it is just a matter of time before everything falls down. The exchange is reporting that the last 24 hour volume is about 264 BTC, so apparently quite a few users are still using it, but we would still advice you to try to get your coins out of the exchange if you have not initiated withdraws yet while you still might actually get something out. Some users had more success converting BTCs to other crypto coins and then withdrawing altocoins instead of directly withdrawing in Bitcoin, so you might try using multiple currencies and in multiple transactions to move any coins you might have in Cryptsy. We have not personally used Cryptsy for quite some time as there have been a lot of other more user friendly and problem free altcoin exchanges available for a while already…

ccMiner SPMOD Release CUDA 6.5 vs CUDA 7.5 Performance Comparison

5 Jan
2016

ccminer-spmod-cuda-65-vs-75

The ccMiner SPMOD fork for Nvidia Maxwell GPUs (source) has recently been migrated to use the newer CUDA 7.5 from the older CUDA 6.5. The latest version with CUDA 6.5 support was version ccMiner 1.5.74 and the latest version is ccMiner 1.5.78 that already uses CUDA 7.5. The first release with CUDA 7.5 had not so good performance and was slower in some algorithms in terms of performance as compared to the latest CUDA 6.5 release, but the latest code has been optimized to offer similar or even better hashrate in most supported algorithms. We took an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 (Gigabyte GV-N970WF3OC-4GD) running at stock frequencies for a spin with some of the currently popular algorithms to compare the performance of the latest CUDA 6.5 to the latest CUDA 7.5 release of ccMiner spmod. The results in the table clearly show that aside from NeoScrypt the latest CUDA 7.5 release offers very similar or even slightly better hashrate compared to the latest CUDA 6.5 version. The hashrate of X13, X15 and Qubit is still slightly slower, but not much. So unless you are mining NeoScrypt you should have no reasons not to upgrade to the newer CUDA 7.5 releases and soon we are probably going to see even better performance thanks to further optimizations of the code. Do note however that some other Maxwell GPUs might have some more variance in terms of performance difference between the two compared versions.

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