Days after Mike Hearn and Gavin Andressen announced a not quite Bitcoin client that when triggered by a particular set of events create an altchain, miner adoption of their forking client remains so low not a single block containing a vote for their coup has been committed to the blockchain. This is in the face of a self declared mining operation claiming a third of a petahash swearing their fealty to Hearn and Andressen's new pet altcoin. In the time since Hearn announced the fork though a pseudonode implementation which passes most tests to be counted as a forking XT node has been published alongside a full node Bitcoin Client which appears to be an XTCoin node in everything except actually forking over to XTCoin if a fork is actually ever triggered. With this early reception to Mike Hearn and Gavin Andressen's fork ultimatum the chances of an actual XTCoin creating fork occurring appear to be low.
Category Archives: Mining
Mining Difficulty Advances For The Third Consecutive Time
The Bitcoin mining difficulty has reached a new all time high of 52,699,842,409. This represents an increase of 0.81% over July 25th's difficulty of 52,278,304,846. Today's change also marks the second time this year that the mining difficulty has increased for the third consecutive time, last occurring during the February 9th, February 22nd and March 8th adjustments. One must look back to 2014 to find more than four consecutive increases at which time double digit adjustments were common, something which is yet to occur in 2015.
Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Continues To Grow
The Bitcoin mining difficulty continues to hit its stride with today's change seeing the difficulty rise to an all time high of 52,278,304,846. This represents an increase of 2.35% over July 11th's difficulty of 51,076,366,303.
Limits of Moore's Law Challenge Intel – Questions About Future Performance
There are numerous reports out today highlighting chip maker Intel's struggles in transitioning from a 14 nanometer to a 10 nanometer manufacturing process. Intel is addressing this challenge by introducing a third generation of chips produced on a 14 nm process. Traditionally Intel delivers two generations of chips at each node size. The first is a shrink of the previous generations chips followed by chips with architectural changes at the same node size, followed by a process shrink. This pattern of Intel's is typically referred to as "Tick" and "Tock" releases at each node size. Continue reading
Mining Difficulty Reaches New High
Today sees the Bitcoin network enter new territory with the mining difficulty advancing to 51,076,366,303, crossing the 50 billion difficulty mark for the first time in its history. Today's increase represents a 3.39% increase over June 28th's difficulty of 49,402,014,931.
Another Post BIP 66 Fork Dies after 3 Blocks
A second fork has followed the initial post BIP 66 fork further highlighting the continued danger of so called "soft" forking changes to the consensus code of Bitcoin network clients. The second fork persisted from 21:50 through to 23:40 on July 5th, 2015. Implementing the rather non-controversial change proposed by BIP 66 to enforce strict DER encoding on ECDSA signatures has without a doubt increased the fragility of the Bitcoin network such that users of all Bitcoin clients ought to consider waiting beyond the traditional 6 mined blocks before considering a transaction confirmed. Unless all major miners begin mining with fully validating node software, this instability is likely to continue indefinitely into the future with users of the latest versions of "Bitcoin Core" at risk of finding themselves stranded, maybe even permanently on the short side of an enduring fork.
French TV Venture CANAL+ Hacked, Suppresses News with DMCA
TorrentFreak reports major French television Canal+ hits Github with DMCA complaint after experiencing a severe AWS breach. The hacker, who ran the “hooperp” Github repository, was able to steal “all the data and codes” regarding its new CRM project “Kiss deploy”, before using the server’s key to mine Bitcoin. Legal counsel for Canal+ revealed: Continue reading
Chain Fork Reveals BIP Process Broken
This weekend the Bitcoin Blockchain experienced a forking incident due a discrepancy between what the expectations of a group developing a Bitcoin network client named "Bitcoin Core" and the actual behavior of Bitcoin miners. The developers of the Bitcoin Core client through a process they refer to as "Bitcoin Improvement Proposals" or BIPs introduced a "soft" forking change into their client which would be triggered through a voting mechanism. In this case miners had appeared to vote in favor of BIP 66, which would have enforced stricter encoding of signatures in an attempt to address the transaction malleability issue which is most notable for having been used as a scapegoat by Mt Gox while actually having little to do with their collapse. Continue reading
Mining Difficulty Decreases By -0.58%
With what is the 13th adjustment in the Bitcoin mining difficulty for this year sees it drop to 49,402,014,931 which is a reduction of -0.58% from June 14th's all time high of 49,692,386,355. Today's decrease marks the 5th time that the mining difficulty has decreased during 2015.
BTC Guild: Closing After Choosing Wrong Side of History
Bitcoin mining pool BTC Guild has just announced their intention to cease operations no later than June 30, 2015. This was announced by eleuthria on tardstalk, where all dead and soon-to-be-dead businesses go to announce "official" news. Continue reading