It Is All About BTC, LTC, ETH, DOGE, KAS mining as well as other alternative crypto currencies
The BitcoinTalk forum, pretty much the largest crypto currency discussion website, is currently experiencing some downtime. It seems that the problem this time is caused by hardware failure, unlike the last time back in November last year when the forum was apparently DDoS attacked. Checking the official twitter account for updates reveals information that apparently the problem was caused by hard drive failure and there could be some extended downtime before things are back online. Also there is information that some of the posts made in the last few hours before the website went down might be lost. Hopefully things with BitcoinTalk will be back to normal later today and the forum will resume operation again…
The cloud mining service Genesis Mining has announced an interesting options to its users that have purchased Scrypt cloud mining hashrate – an option to transfer the Scrypt hashrate into SHA256D hashrate. With the current low Litecoin exchange rate and the high network difficulty a lot of services offering Scrypt cloud mining are close to being unprofitable resulting the in the cancellation of these contracts. While the Scrypt cloud mining hashrate at Genesis Mining is still bringing some prfoit, though not much, the service has decided to offer users the ability to convert their Scrypt hashrate to SHA-256 hashrate. So you can turn 1 MHS into 1 GHS, something that may not seem like a very good offer considering how much you had to pay for for 1 MHS as compared to 1 GHS, but with the current low profitability for Litecoin on the longer term it might not be so bad with the chances that soon your Scrypt mining contract might be terminated if it becomes unprofitable and this trend lasts for 20 consecutive days.
There is a bit of catch though, you have only 3 days from now to make your decision if you want to make the switch from Scrypt to SHA-256 cloud mining hashrate at a rate of 1 MHS for 1 GHS. After that this offer will most likely not be available and it is up to you to decide if you should take it or not as there is still a chance that Litecoin may recover and become viable to mine it again. The only thing you need to do is login to your account and click on the Transfer Hashpower button in your contro panel. A word of warning though, clicking on the button will immediately transfer the Scrypt to SHA-256 hashrate, there will be no confirmation required and you will not be able to reverse your decision. So make sure you carefully decide if you should take up on that offer or not.
The Bitcoin payment processor Coinbase has announced that they have raised $75 million USD in Series C financing, the largest funding round to date for a Bitcoin company, bringing their total capital raised to $106 million US dollars. What is even more interesting however is the companies that have invested in Coinbase this time and not only the serious investment being made. Apart from some of the existing investors the new investors include USAA, BBVA, The New York Stock Exchange, and NTT DoCoMo – Japan’s largest mobile telecommunications operator. There are also personal investments from former Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit and former Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer. It is interesting to see that financial institutions and other large companies are starting to show serious interest in Bitcoin, making major investments is companies dealing with crypto currencies. Great news not only for Coinbase, but also something good for BTC since the start for 2015, something that was really needed after the not so great beginning of the year for crypto currencies.