Author: digital-coin.net

Bitcoin flying high

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Checking currently coinmarketcap.com, Bitcoin reached a new all time high way over 5500USD; currently it shows it as 5626.48USD for a bitcoin which is an increase of about 9% compared to the last peak. Roughly 75% more then what the rate was a little over a month ago. Hope you all invested back then.

Reasons behind it are speculated by analysts to be the expected technical change that will be implemented later this month with the upcoming fork of Bitcoin Gold; like it was done with Bitcoin Cash end of August, to spread the digital currencies even wider. Although if you look at the current rate of Bitcoin Cash, which is 321.08USD right now, we have to see, if that plan will work out to be successful.

Bitcoin price hit over $1500

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The Bitcoin price hit over $1500 in the last days which is a new all time high for the crypto currency. Reason for it? That is the big unknown currently and probably everybody would be interested in. It could be that Bitcoin is getting more attraction also within mainstream medias and hence gains in popularity. Although rumors on various sites go more in the direction that Bitcoin acceptance is rising, as further countries intend to regulate digital currencies. Examples like Mexico, India.

Tradingview: BTC reaches 1500USD

This obviously gives a boost to all the (cloud) miners as the outcome of their investments is much more worth then before. Hope you are also one of them.  Some of them are celebrating it with  special offers. This is what I spotted so far:

  • Hashing24.com:  Use promo code RPM2YC9E at checkout and get 4% discount for your purchase!

If you got more special offers, please let me know. Happy to list.

Review free bitcoin faucet: btcclicks.com

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Overview

BTCClicks.com is another free bitcoin faucet site paying Satoshi’s to view their clients ads. It got standard and premium memberships, offers to rent referrals and more to earn more then a standard user. And it works actually pretty well in my experience so far after testing it for a couple of weeks.

How it works

BTCClicks displays ads from their paying customers to present it to you as a bitcoin receiving viewer of the ads. Depending on how long you have to view the adds the more Satoshi’s you will get booked to your account. This can be anything from 10 to 60 seconds; 10s adds will get at the point of writing around 39 and a 60s ad about 103 Satoshi’s. From your dashboard you go to “Surf ads” select the ones you are interested in or  pay most and the ad will open up in a new tab/window of the browser. BTCClicks starts counting down the seconds, a captcha shows up, currently a small calculation, enter the result and you get the Satoshi’s booked to your account. Once you got 10’000 Satoshi’s and are able to withdraw to your wallet immediately.

If you will get a premium member of BTCClicks – which cost currently for 90days 0.0081 BTC – then you will get more Satoshi’s per ad, and also more referal reward then a normal user. As example a click reward for a 20s ad for a standard user is 50 Satoshi, for a premium user it is 100 Satoshi.

BTCClicks offers also an affiliate program, with various referal methods. Some of them are paids, which I will not go into further details. One of these options is the direct referals option, which works as known from other sites:

Tips’n Tricks

  • Select the longest ads as they pay most Satoshi’s
  • Have it displayed on a separate window – still in the front – so you can also multi-task while viewing the ad

Screenshots

BitLendingClub.com to close their doors in 2017

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bitlendingclub.com LogoBitLendingClub.com sent a message to all of its clients the other day where they stated that they have to close their doors due to regulatory pressure in 2017. This is the message they sent to all customers:

 

BitLendingClub Closing Soon Due to Regulatory Pressure

Dear Customers,
We’ve worked extremely hard to build a platform and a community which is uniquely positioned to provide the Bitcoin ecosystem with a greatly needed service. However, over the last year or so, the regulatory pressures has been increasing to the point that it is no longer feasible to maintain the operation of the platform. We are regretfully announcing that we will have to begint terminating the services effective immediately. Of course, we will maintain some minimal functionality in order to allow our existing users to repay their loans and withdraw their funds.

What Functionality Will Remain?
We will restrict the functionality of the website to either repaying a loan, depositing to repay or withdrawing funds. There will be no new registrations, loan requests, verification of new users, investments or anything else. Just repaying of the existing loans or withdrawal.

When Will The Service Become Restricted? 
We expect to begin restricting the functionality sometime next week. We don’t have a specific date, but we will send out an e-mail when the change occurs.

How Long Will The Platform Remain Operational With Restricted Functionality? 
The platform will remain operational with the limited functionality for 30 days after all loans are either repaid or written off (i.e. they have defaulted and are written off). After that we will be terminating the services completely.  The expected termination date is approximately August 2017. it may be earlier or later, but that’s subject to change.

How Long Do We Have To Withdraw Our Funds?  
Users will be able to withdraw their funds up to 30 days after the last loan is repaid or marked as written off. We will completely terminate the platform 30 days after the last loan is repaid or written off. We recommend that you begin withdrawing your funds immediately.

Again, we’re extremely sad to be delivering this news, but that’s the reality of operating a business in the Bitcoin ecosystem. There are regulatory pressures, which make business extremely difficult and we have always done everything possible to be compliant with regulators. Given that we’ve reached the point where it is no longer feasible to run the platform and be compliant, we have decided to terminate the platform.

Best Wishes,
The BitLendingClub Team

 

So what does that mean for you as an investor? Pretty simple: Monitor your investements and as soon as they are paid back make sure to claim your money back and look for further investment options. Either invest into other platforms or use for further mining.

Cloud mining

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This new article is about mining in the cloud, instead of buying and maintaining your own infrastructure and hardware. Various providers are offering their services in the meantime. Worth comparing prices and services.

In other words: No complex setup of hardware and software, no loud coolers running in your basement, or even worse, in your bedroom: This is all located and managed remotely in an appropriate data center.

So why should I consider cloud mining or not?

You should because:

  • No noisy fans at home
  • No increased electricity bill
  • No expensive new miner to invest into
  • No equipment to get rid of when mining profitability ends

You should NOT because

  • Lower profits: As you delegated the system management, there is some fee involved
  • Opaque mining operations
  • Risk of fraud
  • Less control (and fun)

Types of Bitcoin Cloud Mining

Usually we talk about three forms of remote mining available at the moment:

  1. Leased hashing power: Rent an amount of hashing power without owning/renting a dedicated physical/virtual equipment. This is the most popular form of cloud mining.
  2. Hosted mining: Renting mining hardware that is hosted by the provider
  3. Virtual hosted mining: Rent a virtual private (standard) server and install your own mining software on it

 

Cloud mining providers overview

On this page I will start to add cloud mining provider reviews including a scoring so you see immediately if they are worth considering or not. The page just started, so it is a bit slim currently.

New section: Investing Bitcoins

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As more and more platforms with Bitcoin investment possibilities show up across the globe, I try to list here the most interesting companies where either

  • my research resulted into overall positive impression
  • I made positive experience myself

If you got other got investment tips, I am very happy to hear about it.

The page into two sections currently: Either you can deposit your Bitcoins into an account and you are getting paid a regular interest on your funds. you can do active trading and earn based on your investments.

-> Investing Bitcoins

Please remember that all of these investments will always come with certain risks involved, so please make sure to do your due diligence accordingly before sending money to anyone in the world you don’t know.

bitcoin.org: 0.13.0 Binary Safety Warning

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This message is directly coming from bitcoin.org to raise awareness of a potential state sponsored attack and about possible mitigation:

Summary

Bitcoin.org has reason to suspect that the binaries for the upcoming Bitcoin Core release will likely be targeted by state sponsored attackers. As a website, Bitcoin.org does not have the necessary technical resources to guarantee that we can defend ourselves from attackers of this calibre. We ask the Bitcoin community, and in particular the Chinese Bitcoin community to be extra vigilant when downloading binaries from our website.

In such a situation, not being careful before you download binaries could cause you to lose all your coins. This malicious software might also cause your computer to participate in attacks against the Bitcoin network. We believe Chinese services such as pools and exchanges are most at risk here due to the origin of the attackers.

Mitigation

The hashes of Bitcoin Core binaries are cryptographically signed with this key.

We strongly recommend that you download that key, which should have a fingerprint of 01EA5486DE18A882D4C2684590C8019E36C2E964. You should securely verify the signature and hashes before running any Bitcoin Core binaries. This is the safest and most secure way of being confident that the binaries you’re running are the same ones created by the Core Developers.

 

If you don’t how to verify the integrity of a file, head over the instructions page of openoffice.org. There you will find explanations available for Windows, Linux, online and more:
http://www.openoffice.org/download/checksums.html

 

Prepare a PC power supply to use with a mining device

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Many mining devices do not have an internal power supply (PSU) hence they depend on an external one. In most cases it is a standard PC PSU. All modern power supply are intended to be used within a computer and switched on via the power button. As you your miner does not have such a power button, you have to ‘hack’ your PSU to run standalone. Here is how to ‘hack’ your PSU.

Requirements:

  • paper clip (or some wire)
  • electrical tape
  • pincers
  • a power supply

Cut the paper clip according to the pictures below. Then tape it with the electrical tape for shielding.

psu_paperclip_taped

Prepare paperclips for PSU

Prepare paperclips for PSU

Once this is done, ensure the power supply is switched off and not connected to the power plug. Put the paper clip in pin 4 and 5 of the 24switch connector to connect them. This bridges the POWER function of the PSU and it starts running as soon as it gets power. You can additionally shield the paperclip with electrical tape. This also ensures the clip does not fall out of the pins.

PSU Bridged and Taped

PSU Bridged and Taped

 

To make sure you don’t damage the PSU, don’t let it run on its own for too long without any power consuming device.

 

Setup your Raspberry Pi as mining device controller

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As I just bought a new miner (Rockbox new R-Box) I was looking into a convenient way to operate and administrate this box. Currently it is running on a Windows 7 machine using cgminer (a tutorial will follow on that one). As I got some Raspberry Pi’s lying around, I was looking into way how to setup one of the Pi’s as controller.

After digging around I bit, I found first Minepeon. But after a bit of research on the project page and the forums, it seems this project is pretty much dead: Latest release is from early 2014, forums not having any recent post except for one thread with the title “Minepeon Project Died?“.

So I found this great project called “Minera“. Minera is a – very important – active project providing a lot of features on how to control your mining device(s). Its features are

  • Web frontend with Dashboard and widgets
  • Currencies rates
  • Detailed tables for pool and device info’s
  • Charts
  • System monitor like temperature, system load
  • Autorestart, autorecover
  • and much more

Sounds like the tool you need? That is exactly what I thought as well.

Minera Dashboard

Minera Dashboard

 

Hardware requirements

  • Raspberry Pi
  • USB Power plug (preferable with a on/off switch
  • HDMI cable in case you like to attach a TV/monitor to the Pi
  • SD card with at least 4gb

 

Software requirements

Browse to the Minera project page and download the prepared image for your Raspberry Pi in the download section. Click on “Auto Install” and the download starts. Once the download completed, extract the zip file with your favourite zip tool (like Winzip, Winrar, Archive Manager). This gives you the the file minera-latest.img.

As the next step, copy the image to the SD card. Depending on the operating system you are using, it may vary a bit. As mentioned before, this SD card needs to be at least 4gb.

  • Linux: If you are on Linux you can use ImageWriter or the command line below. You probably have to run it with the sudo command or as root:
    dd bs=4M if=minera-latest.img of=/dev/your-sd-card
  • Windows: If you are on Windows you can use Win32DiskImager
  • Mac OSX: If you are on a Mac OS X you can use ApplePi-Baker

Writing the image to the SD card may take a while. Once completed, put it into your Raspberry Pi, connect the Power/USB and the HDMI cable to it, attach any mining devices and boot it up.

There is not a lot to see on the monitor, as Minera is mainly controlled via the web interface. But it shows you an important detail: The IP address where Minera is reachable. So go to your computer and type in the following URL

http://<RaspberryPi IP>/minera

The default password is “minera”. There you go; welcome to your mining dashboard.

In the next article we look at how to configure Minera:

  • How to add your mining pool
  • select your favourite mining sftware (cgminer, bfgminer)
  • and explore some other features
Minera Settings

Minera Settings

Signed Windows Driver for Bitfury USB Miners

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Bitfury Logo

Bitfury Logo

Clearing currently a lot of my stuff and found the signed driver for Windows which I used for my Blue Bitfury USB miner a while ago. I remember, that it was a challenge to find it, hence I thought I put it online for you. It work d like a charm with Windows 7 and was running for months. Feel free to grab it, if you are looking for it. This is the version I downloaded end of 2013.

Signed Windows Driver for Bitfury USB Miners