Tag: miners

Vast Energy Use of Bitcoin Criticized

The University of Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance has calculated that Bitcoin’s total energy consumption is somewhere between 40 and 445 terawatt hours (TWh) a year, with a central estimate of about 130 terawatt hours, reports the BBC: The UK’s electricity consumption is a little over 300 TWh a year, while Argentina uses around the same amount of power as the…

NVIDIA Limits RTX 3060 Crypto Speeds As it Introduces Mining Cards

Worried that the GeForce RTX 3060 will be sold out as cryptocurrency miners snap up every GPU in sight? NVIDIA thinks it has a simple way to help: make the new card unattractive to the crypto crowd. From a report: The company has revealed that it’s cutting the hash rate (mining efficiency) of the RTX 3060 in half for Ethereum miners….

Massive Blackouts Have Hit Iran. The Government is Blaming Bitcoin Mining.

Massive blackouts and smog have hit cities across Iran. It’s a toxic mix as the country, already under economic duress and suffocating U.S. sanctions, simultaneously battles the region’s worst coronavirus outbreak. Blackouts are not new in Iran, where an aging and subsidized electricity sector is plagued by alleged mismanagement. But this time, government officials say that bitcoin mining at cryptocurrency farms…

Bitcoin Miners in Nordic Region Get a Boost From Cheap Power

The Nordic region once again has become a lucrative place to mine crypto-currencies, thanks to a plunge in electricity prices. From a report: The wettest weather in at least 20 years boosted production from hydro-electric plants, leaving Sweden and Norway with some of the lowest power prices in the world. The resulting glut in the most important raw material for making…

Venezuela’s Socialist Regime Is Mining Bitcoin In a Bunker To Generate Cash

The socialist regime once cracked down on bitcoin miners. Now it’s mining the digital asset itself. From a report: At a military base outside Caracas, Venezuela, state video footage shows officers in green fatigues cut a blue ribbon donned with a cluster of glossy balloons. Then, the men pry open the doors of a narrow, dimly-lit bunker. But the balloons weren’t…

Divers Find Evidence of Prehistoric Mining Operation in North America

Iwastheone shared this article from CBS News:
Experts and cave divers in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula have found ocher mines that are some of the oldest on the continent. Ancient skeletons were found in the narrow, twisting labyrinths of now-submerged sinkhole caves… The discovery of remains of human-set fires, stacked mining debris, simple stone tools, navigational aids and digging sites suggest humans went…

Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Drops by 6% In First Adjustment After Halving

The Bitcoin network just fine-tuned a key parameter to coax back miners who quit after last week’s halving hammered their profits. From a report: More than 20 exahashes per second (EH/s) of computing power — the equivalent of around 1.5 million older-generation mining machines — has been switched off from Bitcoin since the network’s halving. The 7-day rolling average of Bitcoin’s…

The Pirate Bay Blocked By MalwareBytes But Normal Service Will Be Resumed

The Pirate Bay returned to the clear web this week after a month-long hiatus. However, the structure of the infamous torrent index presented an access problem to users of the popular anti-malware software MalwareBytes, which persistently blocked an essential element of the platform due to the presence of “a few” cryptocurrency miners on a secondary domain. TorrentFreak reports: The problem lay…

The Countdown To Bitcoin Halving 2020 Begins

Ali Raza from InsideBitcoins discusses the expected Bitcoin Halving in May 2020, and the impact it will have on the market valuation. From the report: The next Bitcoin Halving will take place on May 20th 2020. It will be the third time, that the block reward of the most known blockchain will be halved. As a consequence, miners will earn 50…