Sunday, January 19, 2014

iBuyPower offers Desktop PC’s optimized for virtual money mining. Beginning of a new trend?



Desktop PC series dubbed CoinMine are entering the market at a time when more and more people joins the captivate world of crypto-currencies. AMD-based system starts at $999, while the version with Intel Core i3 and 8GB of RAM costs $1559 or more.

The main differentiating factor from other merchants is the possibility to configure up to 3 video cards from the AMD Radeon R9 series, a most popular choice among the crypto-currencies miners due to their high computational performance.

Saturday, January 18, 2014

Bitcoin transactions: Why it is recommended to wait for at least six confirmations?


Due to its decentralized nature, bitcoin can’t rely on a master authoritative source to prevent double-spending, when an attacker tries to spend some money more than once. Anyway, various defensive strategies have been implemented to minimize chances for such a fraudulent activity to happen in the bitcoin network.

One particular approach, described by the Bitcoin Wiki as a Brute force attack, can be attempted by an attacker with relatively high mining hashrate, but not necessarily above 50% level. The attack would follow this pattern:

CoinCalendar.eu – monitoring new crypto coins launch dates


Too overwhelmed with new coins announcements? New website called AltCoinCalendar comes to the rescue. In the handy calendar format, it shows when the new cryptocurrencies are supposed to launch, along with short description of their parameters. This could be an useful resource for miners, who like to bet of new currencies, giving them the chance to mine from the very beginning when the difficulty is still small.

The new website plans to monitor the opening dates of new crypto-exchanges as well. This month, one such exchange, Crycurex.com, is planned to launch at Jan 31.