The outgoing year surprises every day. Minerale.io prepared a selection of the most interesting and unusual news over the past week:

400% grow of cryptojacking

Specialists of Kaspersky said that hackers increased the level of attacks on crypto world several times in one year. Read more

BTC is falling down. Again

During the year, bitcoin lost 81% of the cost and dropped below 3300. Experts are sure of a further fall in January 2019. Read more

Cryptofootball tokens

Brazilian team make currency for funs: Galo coins, which can be used to purchase tickets and souvenirs. Read more

ETH vs. BCH: who is the winner?

For the first time in the history of cryptocurrency trading, Ethereum beat Bitcoin Cash. Read more

Cryptocurrencies in China: New Rules

Experts believe that the updated legislation can seriously hit small crypto companies. Read more

That’s all, dear friends! See you next week in our digest!

Welcome to our encyclopedia of mining history by Minerall.io. This time, let’s talk about ASICminer.

A company started on July 18, 2012. After six years, the head of the company, its ideological inspirer and founder, remains in the shadows. Who is the person with the nickname FriedCat? Nobody knows.

Creators of ASICminer didn’t follow the standard way of finding investments, but decided to act innovatively: the company’s shares in the seed-phase were divided among investors, and the rest went to the stock exchange.

In the first quarter of 2013, a first chip from ASICminer entered the market. It was relatively inexpensive — the development cost the company $ 150,000.

First generation of miners had sturdy characteristics: a hashrate of 10 Gh/s and power consumption of about 100 watts. Blade Block Erupter plate gave twice as much efficiency as the FPGA of that time.

ASICminer was the pioneer of mining data centers: plates can be installed in standard 19” server racks. The first batch was bought out in the first hour, and the auctions were carried out only among the shareholders. The cost of one device was $ 12,500. The overall performance of all devices was 40 Th/s, which is almost two times more effective than the entire Bitcoin network. The efficiency of the data center allowed to lead in the industry for several months.

Blade Block Erupter v.2 was the next step in the development of ASICminer. Its price was $ 7,500 at the start of sales in April 2013. The miners’ hopes were justified, and in the summer company released an improved model of the ASICminer Cube (price — $ 7,000). The device could boast a performance of 36 Gh/s with power consumption of 430 watts.

A single-chip portable version of USB Block Erupter can be called a failed ASICminer experiment. Its capacity was 330 Mh/s. Due to the low cost (about 1 Bitcoin at the rate of 2013), the miner caused a hectic interest, but within a few months the hype went down to zero.

In the late summer of 2013, competitors began to put pressure on ASICminer, and the company’s shares began to fall. Only in 2014, a company managed to re-enter the market, but products are hopelessly outdated. Soon FriedCat disappeared, taking with him the remaining money.

That’s how bright and short life of ASICminer ended. But it’s giving a powerful impulse to the development of modern type miners.

We say goodbye to you until next week. Wait for the new chapter of the history of mining with Minerall.io!

1. CHOOSE MINING HARDWARE

Before getting started, you will need to:

• Buy mining hardware: these days, mining can be profitable only if you invest in ASIC miners. To check the profitability of your hardware, please visit WhatToMine;
• Connect to your ASICs following special manual what is supposed to be provided with your machine.

2. CREATE BTC WALLET

To get rewards from mining, you need to have your personal BTC wallet. If you have issues with choosing one — reach our support team, we’ll share some of our suggestions.

3. CONNECT MINER TO THE POOL

To start mining in the pool, you need to configure your miner. Here are Minerall.io pool settings for AntMiner:

• Open Miner Configuration tab, in General Settings.
• Change General Configuration using following credentials for one Pool, or for all three Pools (recommended add at least one backup pool) if you would like to work with Minerall.io only.
• Use following credentials for Registered Mining:
  • URL: stratum+tcp://pool.minerall.io:3101
  • Worker: UserName.WorkerName
  • Password: (optional)
• Use following credentials for Anonymous Mining:
  • URL: stratum+tcp://pool.minerall.io:3101
  • Worker: Wallet.WorkerName
  • Password: (optional)

If you have any questions, you can ask in a letter to our support service (support@minerall.io) or in Telegram-chat: https://t.me/minerallen

Minerall.io welcomes you to the latest news of the past week. We collect for you the most interesting and burning events. Here they are.

Crypto-Korea: what to expect?

The government of South Korea is increasingly immersed in the world of cryptocurrency. Next in line is a global discussion at the highest level. Read more

Abu Dhabi+ IBM=?

Abu Dhabi National Oil Company has started cooperation with IBM in the blockchain. The pilot project will allow Arab oil and gas producers to automate transactions and receive even more millions. Read more

For hard forks — to court!

UnitedCorp wants to defend the honor of Bitcoin Cash by suing Bitmain, Bitcoin.com, Roger Ver, Kraken Bitcoin Exchange. Read more

BTC for 333 000$?

Bobby Lee believes that in 2021 the cost of bitcoin will fly to the moon, and in January 2019 it will drop to $ 2500. Read more

Israel: no more Bitmain

The head office of the company Bitmain closed the developer center and fired all employees. Read more

That’s all! See you next week at the same time!

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) — Bitcoin version, resulting from the hard fork of the original blockchain. Cryptocurrency has SHA-256 Hash Algorithm. The maximum amount is 21 000 000 coins;

Bitcoin Cash is the product of the collaboration of mining pool viaBTC (mining pool) and Bitmain for the implementation of a user-activated hard fork (UAHF).

Standard features of BTC & BTH

• Both currencies are developed using the same protocol;
• Same algorithm for hash counting;
• POW (Proof of Work) for receiving rewards;
• The same coin mining speeds and the number of Bitcoin Cash coins.

Differences BTC & BTH

• Users can create blocks of 8 megabytes in size (which is 8 times larger than the blockchain bitcoin block);
• The complexity of generating new blocks changes much more often — after every 6 mined parts of the blockchain (in the case of the cue ball, this figure was 2016 blocks).

Prospects

Roger Ver believes that all BTC owners need to switch to Bitcoin Cash right now. Now the cost of the coin is not so high. But many people still trust their investments in this currency. And this allows you to make a favorable forecast for the course at least for the next year.

1. CHOOSE MINING HARDWARE

Before getting started, you will need to:

• Buy mining hardware: these days, mining can be profitable only if you invest in ASIC miners. To check the profitability of your hardware, please visit WhatToMine;
• Connect to your ASICs following special manual what is supposed to be provided with your machine.

2. CREATE BCH WALLET

To get rewards from mining, you need to have your personal BCH wallet. Here are some popular wallets:

• Check wallet at BitcoinABC‌‌‌‌;
• Get the latest version — download it;
• Choose folder for OS you’re using;
• Choose install file and open it.

3. CONNECT MINER TO THE POOL

To start mining in the pool, you need to configure your miner. Here are Minerall.io pool settings for AntMiner:

• Open Miner Configuration tab, in General Settings.
• Change General Configuration using following credentials for one Pool, or for all three Pools (recommended add at least one backup pool) if you would like to work with Minerall.io only.
• Use following credentials for Registered Mining:
  • URL: stratum+tcp://pool.minerall.io:3102
  • Worker: UserName.WorkerName
  • Password: (optional)
• Use following credentials for Anonymous Mining:
  • URL: stratum+tcp://pool.minerall.io:3102
  • Worker: Wallet.WorkerName
  • Password: (optional)

If you have any questions, you can ask in a letter to our support service (support@minerall.io) or in Telegram-chat: https://t.me/minerallen

Minerall.io on air right now with a weekly digest of the most interesting news from the world of cryptocurrency. Last week was eventful and here are the hottest ones:

Rise again!

Bitcoin rise up to the mark of $ 4,000 and steadily kept at this level. What will happen next? Read more

Big Brother is watching you

G20 members are discussing the possibility of regulating the cryptocurrency market. Is it good or bad? Read more

Crypto-Ohio: The Next Step

After deciding to use the blockchain to control taxes, Ohio authorities are going to use $ 100 million to invest in the cryptocurrency. Read more

Rumors are true: NASDAQ on the board

Rumors have confirmed that the NASDAQ Exchange is ready to launch Bitcoin futures in the first half of 2019. Read more

Home mining: Pros and Cons

What awaits home-miners in the Era of cryptocurrencies’ ups and downs? Read more (Russian article)

That’s all for today! See you next week on our blog.

Answer by Igor Stadnyk, CEO Minerall.io

— American company conducted a research. According to it, mining of Ethereum with the help of video cards became unprofitable. How dangerous is the situation in general? 

— That is the question with a trick. I will explain why. There are industrial and home mining alone. And the difference between them is fundamental. Let’s take the situation in Ukraine as an example: with the price of electricity at 10 cents per kW/h for enterprises, the card px570 mines ether at 34 cents per day. For the electricity you’re paying 29 cents. In such a situation, mining is advantageous when the losses in the power system are less than 20%. Another question, home mining — unfortunately, the vast majority of miners mine «to zero.»

— And to what limit should ETH fall (if it has not collapsed yet) so that Ukrainian miners would start turning off their machines?

Right now, many Ukrainian miners are throwing farms away and putting up video cards for sale. However, I think that this is a reaction to a massive fall in the price of cryptocurrency and elimination out those who are not interested in collective mining. First of all, it is a natural selection, not a crisis. If you would understand this, then the phobia about cryptocurrency fluctuations will come to naught.

In any case, industrial mining is alive and will live: the minimum price of ether for mining at such a cost of electricity will be approximately $100-110 per coin.

— What is the future for video cards’ mining?

Well, the failure of the mining on video cards is still very far and one can hardly expect its funeral soon. Moreover, I believe that the cryptocurrency exchange rate will become stable since it is not profitable for traders to sink the exchange.

Good news for Ethereum fans: we added Ethereum Classic to our coin listing as one of the most exciting and potentially profitable coins.

Ethereum Classic was born after the DAO hard fork (after the great hacking of wallets on Ethereum in 2016 and theft of coins totaling more than $ 50,000,000). For the first time, it started selling Poloniex on a crypto-exchange. The main advantage of Ethereum Classic is smart contracts, this program automatically checks all contract terms and fulfills all obligations.
Ethereum Classic has some essential features:

The project fully preserved all the principles of decentralization and free choice of the market.
Guarantees. The system guarantees complete security. And despite the many attacks that were made on this system, it continues to function.

Another significant advantage of this cryptocurrency is the ability to exchange on many exchanges immediately for cash inventory, without exchanging at BTC.
Ethereum Classic has an unlimited number of coins so that mining will remain in demand.

It has been confirmed that it has been the case for the blockchain platform. It can be trusted.

Development prospects: Ethereum Classic is a cryptocurrency. Simply said.