As if Bitmain’s year hasn’t been rough enough, having posted big losses and laying off entire departments, its flagship product now has a firmware vulnerability. A few weeks ago, Bitcoin Core contributor James Hilliard discovered an exploit in Bitmain’s S15 firmware. The pseudonymous Twitter user 00whiterabbit, also known simply as “john,” subsequently wrote exploit code…
Cryptocurrency mining pool Sparkpool has said it is temporarily freezing a mysterious 2,100 ether payment it received Tuesday and is waiting for the sender to reach out for a solution. The transaction was received as an apparent reward for mining just one block on the ethereum blockchain, but the amount is roughly 600 times the…
China-based mining giant Bitmain has announced a new mining rig that uses less power. The hardware mining manufacturer has launched a 7nm application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) processor dubbed the BM1397. Beyond energy efficiency, the new mining processor promises to achieve faster performance for mining cryptocurrencies that use the SHA256 algorithm for their proof of work…
Bitmain Technologies has announced a new 7-nanometer bitcoin mining processor that it says offers new levels of energy efficiency. The new ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit), called the BM1397, is said to provide improvements in performance, chip size and energy efficiency for mining proof-of-work cryptocurrencies based on the SHA256 algorithm, such as bitcoin (BTC) and bitcoin…
United States-based software corporation Microsoft has removed eight Windows 10 applications from its official app store after cybersecurity firm Symantec identified the presence of surreptitious Monero (XMR) coin mining code. The news was reported by Symantec on Feb. 15. Stealth crypto mining — also know as cryptojacking – works by installing malware that uses a…
Over the last few years, certain cryptocurrency networks have tried to block ASIC mining with many fruitless attempts to forge ASIC-resistant protocols. Multiple cryptocurrency developers have attempted to brick ASIC miners, but with scant success. A perfect example is the privacy-centric digital currency Monero, a project that has tried to fork the software multiple times…
The daily Bitcoin (BTC) transaction volume has been recently increasing to the levels not seen since January 2018, after BTC hit the $20,000 price mark, according to data from transactionfee.info. Some industry players believe that it is a sign of the evolution of the cryptocurrency’s ecosystem and fundamentals. Bitcoin transactions per day. Source: transactionfee.info Jameson…
Bitfury Group and South Korean R&D firm Commons Foundation are jointly launching a network of bitcoin mining operations in Paraguay. Announcing the partnership on Thursday, Bitfury said a series of mining centers will be set up in the South American country using its BlockBox AC bitcoin mining devices. Further, the mines will be powered by…
Whenever I claim that bitcoin is the only decentralized cryptocurrency, I get one of two arguments: My X coin is also decentralized. Bitcoin isn’t decentralized because of Core and/or miners. I’ll leave 1 and the first half of 2 for another day, but the “mining centralization” argument is what I want to tackle in this…
Kevin Dowd is a Professor of Finance and Economics in the Business School at Durham University, and the co-author of the 2015 paper “Bitcoin Will Bite the Dust.” For more on bitcoin’s 10th anniversary, check out our new interactive feature Bitcoin At 10. ————————————————————— Back in August 2014, I discovered that the bitcoin mining industry had…