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BitPay CEO Stephen Pair: Bitcoin Unlimited Would Materially Degrade the Network – Bitcoin Magazine

April 5, 2017 | Author: admin

Bitcoin Magazine
BitPay CEO Stephen Pair: Bitcoin Unlimited Would Materially Degrade the Network
Bitcoin Magazine
BitPay CEO Stephen Pair has been more vocal about his company's stance on Bitcoin's scaling debate over the past few weeks, and his most recent attempt to further clarify the Bitcoin payment processing giant's view on the matter was on episode 325 of ...
1Hash Bitcoin Pool Comes out against Bitcoin UnlimitedCryptoCoinsNews

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Bitcoin Mining Retirement Plan or Missed Opportunity? – The Merkle

April 5, 2017 | Author: admin

One of the most appealing aspects of Bitcoin is the ability to create it out of thin air via a process known as mining. While thats a bit of an oversimplification (earning Bitcoin is more about contributing hardware than alchemy), mining remains an incentive for getting on board with Satoshi Nakamotos magic internet money but is mining still a feasible activity for the average personalmost a decade after Bitcoinfirst appeared?

Assuming that average person is somebody with an equally average computer, the answer is no, simply because the era when mining was profitable with off-the-shelf graphics cards is long gone. Mining with a PC isstill possible but the viability of the undertaking hinges on the amount of gigahertz per second a device can produce: a new NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 can be overclocked to 4.4GHz while a specialized Antminer S9 comes in at 14THz.

The difference between gaming components and specialized ASIC miners in terms of power is therefore enormous. With electricity costs, mining on a high-end graphics processor produces a loss of about $629 a year; the Antminer S9 makes about $1,000 in profit. However, theres a problem the S9 is very expensive, costing about $2100 (power supply sold separately), which means that in almost every case, solo mining isnt really worth it.

The obvious solution is to pool resources. If money is no option, buying a thousand ASICs and a small power plant is a good business plan but regular 9-5ers have a better shot at earning Bitcoin by joining a mining pool, or group of like-minded people. A piece of software like GuiMiner comes pre-configured for the most popular mining pools and provides an easy-to-use interface for operating each miner.

Solo mining can be a luck-based endeavor that pays out over a course of years. With a mining pool, the rewards arent as valuable but they can be more consistent. AGuiMiner pool may alsosupport in-app balance management, including the withdrawal of funds. Ultimately, forging ahead as a Bitcoin maverick or banding together to mine is a decision based on things like finances and access to hardware.

So, when did mining get so tough? Bitcoin has a creeping difficulty level, both in terms of how easy it is to dig out the cryptocurrency and how much there is to be found. Before going into why though, its important to understand what mining is; briefly, its the process by which Bitcoin transactions are added to a permanent ledger known as the blockchain. Miners donate computing power to solve the equations central to the operation of the Bitcoin network.

Mining is designed to get harder over time to compensate for the increasing capabilities ofmodern ASICs, with that growing complexity preventing super-powered hardware devouring all the available Bitcoins overnight. Similarly, to ensure a consistent supply of coins, an event called the Halvening cuts the possible rewards that can be earned for completing a block every four years, the most recent one occurring in July 2016.

So, in summary, yes it is possible to make money from Bitcoin mining but, for most people, its either a community endeavor or a veryexpensive one.

If you liked this article, follow us on Twitter @themerklenews and make sure to subscribe to our newsletter to receive the latest bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and technology news.

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Cryptocurrency Market Cap Soars to All-Time High Near $28 Billion … – CryptoCoinsNews

April 5, 2017 | Author: admin

A bullish 2017 for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies has helped spur the overall cryptocurrency market cap through a series of highs this year, to nearly scale $28 billion over the weekend.

On Sunday, April 2, the collective market cap from Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies (alt coins) reached an all-time high of $27.9 billion. In the lead-up to that figure, combined cryptocurrency trading volumes exceeded $860 million in a 24-hour period. The swell has been helped by strong showing from a number of cryptocurrencies including Litecoin and Ripple, both of which have witnessed tremendous gains over the past week. Litecoin prices have doubled in a 5-day period, while Ripple prices soared to a 2 year high, scaling beyond $800 million in total market capitalization. A record-setting March for Ethereum also helped the combined altcoin market to push beyond $10 billion for the first time ever over the weekend.

While bitcoin remains the undisputed king in its dominance of the overall market, its overall influence has dropped to all-time lows after marked gains from altcoins.

Bitcoins overall share of the total cryptocurrency market cap slipped under 65% for the first time ever on Sunday. Uncertainties from the ongoing scalability debate have resulted in bitcoin dropping below $1,000 after mid-March but a recent strong showing has pushed bitcoin back above $1,100 as the market appears to cement the milestone as the new support.

Altogether, the value of the combined cryptocurrency market has gained nearly 350% compared to this time a month ago, underlining the remarkable rise in adopters and investors interest in cryptocurrencies.

Featured image from Shutterstock. Charts from CoinMarketCap.

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TaaS partners with cryptocurrency exchange platforms Livecoin and Kuna – EconoTimes

April 5, 2017 | Author: admin

Wednesday, April 5, 2017 4:25 AM UTC

TaaS, a tokenized closed-end fund dedicated to blockchain assets, is partnering withtwo cryptocurrency exchanges, Livecoin and Kuna,to offer its tokens for trading startingApril 28, 2017.

The platform uses Ethereum blockchain and its revolutionary Cryptographic Audit technology to offer an innovative way to participate in and benefit from capital raising and fund management. TaaS lets users invest in the vast cryptocurrency market with complete auditing transparency.

Livecoin is a user-friendly platform for accessing cryptocurrency exchange markets, designed for beginners and more seasoned traders alike. Livecoin will allow TaaS to be traded with USD and BTC.

The partnership with TaaS will aid us in our mission to provide a modern and easy-to-use service for accessing cryptocurrency exchange markets. Our agreement with TaaS will prove mutually beneficial in allowing both companies to bring even more people into the burgeoning space of digital currency investments, Livecoin CEO Svetlana Geller said.

Kuna is the first bitcoin agency in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, offering customers the ability to buy and sell bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies. The company has also deployed a network of bitcoin ATMs. Kuna will allow TaaS to be traded with BTC.

Kuna is delighted to add TaaS, an innovator in blockchain technology investment, to the Kuna cryptocurrency exchange. We believe Kunas customers will greatly appreciate the opportunity to take advantage of TaaS groundbreaking offering and that the partnership will help to grow and strengthen Kunas platform, Kuna Founder Michael Chobanian added.

TaaS issues tokens built on a profit-sharing smart contract in which token owners receive 50% of quarterly profits. The smart contracts guarantee that investors will receive profits. To increase the funds capital pool without requiring additional investment, 25% of profits are reinvested back into the fund. As the net asset value of a token increases, TaaS tokens will have their value tied to the performance of the parent project.

According to the official release,TaaS is open for investment exclusively during its month-long Initial Coin Offering (ICO), concludingApril 27, 2017. Investors will be able to trade TaaS tokens on Livecoin and Kuna after the conclusion of TaaS ICO. So far, the TaaS ICO has raised more than $2,670,000 USD from 1259 investors globally.

TaaS is proud to partner with Livecoin and Kuna, helping early adopters capitalize on the surging blockchain and cryptocurrency spaces. With the TaaS token tradable on the Livecoin and Kuna exchanges, more investors can gain easy, fully transparent and convenient access to the vast cryptocurrency market, TaaS Co-founder and President RuslanGavrilyuksaid.

Now past the 2,000 BTC milestone, TaaS is offering a 20% bonus for the next 1,000 BTC raised, with the bonus system decreasing progressively up to 9,000 BTC. TaaS will reserve 2% of collected funds for bounty programs.

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Cryptocurrency Investors Push Litecoin Above $9 USD as SegWit Activation Draws Near – Razor-Forex

April 5, 2017 | Author: admin

But the push within the Litecoin community to activate the much-hyped, controversial Segregated Witness (SegWit) upgrade framework on the Litecoin network - which failed to garner sufficient support within the Bitcoin miner community due to disagreements between large mining pools - has once again reignited investors interest.

Over the last couple of days, agreement among Litecoin miners on SegWit has risen dramatically, with several large pools like F2Pool, LitecoinPool and Batpool signaling their support. The SegWit framework requires approximately 75% of blocks mined on the network to come from pro-SegWit miners, before activating.

Although the SegWit upgrade fixes the transaction malleability bug, investors are betting that SegWit activation on Litecoin will open up the door for instant transactions to be enabled via Lightning Networks in the near future, allowing Litecoins blockchain network to service hundreds of millions of users.

Charlie Lee, creator of Litecoin and Director of Engineering at San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, recently said this about the potential of the Lightning Network:

News of the rapidly-rising support for SegWit prompted many cryptocurrency investors to pile into Litecoin towards the end of March and into the start of April, pushing the price of the digital currency to $9.489 on April 3rd - its highest value since July 12, 2014:

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Litecoin photo by BTC Keychain

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With Synereo’s Qrator You Could Earn Cryptocurrency by Sharing … – Finance Magnates

April 5, 2017 | Author: admin

Tel-Aviv-based startupSynereo announced today its first attention economy toolkit component. Qrator is an app for users to monetize original content and get rewarded for sharing and finding content on the web. Itwill be released as beta in June.

According to Synereo, Qrators first onramp from the existing internet is a browser extension that follows the user while browsing through content hosting platforms such as YouTube, Soundcloud and the like, and enables them to amplify content pieces such as videos, music clips or articles, using AMPs Synereos native cryptocurrency.

Amplification in this respect means that the user has the ability to stake an amount of AMPs on a given piece of content, spread it through various social channels, and collect a dividend if the piece of content is liked or reposted. Alongside, the original creator of the content receives a share of every Amplification fee paid.

Users can monitor their statistics on the Qrator Dashboard and analyze the added value theyve created in terms of reach and traffic, and understand how their curation activity affects their AMP dividends.

Our main goal at this stage is giving users a taste of how a network in which they are compensated for content creation and curation feels like. Additionally, Qrator will allow us to build a cross-platform social graph and bootstrap network effects on top of existing services. With this information and user base, Synereo will be able to hit the ground running with its decentralized social networking app already populated with users, their social environments, identities and histories all securely stored on the blockchain, privately owned, accessible and controlled by them only, said Dor Konforty, Synereo CEO.

After the closed beta release, Qrator will be connected to a decentralized Content Delivery Network, allowing users to directly upload content to a distributed hosting service, bypassing existing centralized networks such as YouTube entirely. With content hosted on the Synereo CDN, and user identities and social graphs being stored on a blockchain secured system, Synereos next step will be an independent social network with attention economy implementations.

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Flash, cloud top data storage options for storage pros – TechTarget

April 5, 2017 | Author: admin

Around the start of the decade, forward-thinking storage experts predicted flash and cloud would eventually become...

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the dominant storage tiers.

Those predictions of popular data storage options appear on target, according to TechTarget's 2017 IT Priorities survey. The survey included 201 respondents who said that storage or backup and disaster recovery were areas where they devote most of their time. Nearly half of each group called the cloud a main priority. The 48% who picked cloud backup as a priority put that at the top of the secondary to-do list. Cloud storage also showed up on 48% of respondents' priority list for primary storage, eclipsed only by the combination of all-flash arrays (31%) and solid-state storage (30%).

When they think about data storage options, many more storage pros have their heads in the clouds than a year ago. In 2016, 37% of respondents said they would deploy the cloud for primary storage and only 24% claimed they would deploy cloud backup. Cloud backup showed up as a 2017 priority more than backup hardware (26%) and backup software refreshes (19%) combined.

Another 16% said they would deploy cloud DR or outsourced disaster recovery this year. That's fewer than the 26% who said they will do in-house DR in 2017, but cloud DR combines with cloud backup to show up on 73% of data protection projects. And the cloud is cutting into in-house DR projects, which declined from 40% in 2016.

Solid-state storage is also high on the list of primary data storage options, with more than 60% saying they will deploy all-flash arrays or solid-state storage. In 2016, 29% said they would deploy solid-state storage. Not surprisingly, data reduction for primary storage -- a key technology for deploying all-flash arrays -- soared to 25% from 16% a year ago by piggy-backing on solid-state's popularity.

Hyper-converged infrastructure is the big mover among 2017 top storage priorities, with 24% putting it on their to-do list, nearly doubling from 13% who said they would use converged or hyper-converged infrastructure in 2016. Object storage is another riser, shooting from 9% in 2016 to 16% this year. Its 2017 popularity rivals scale-out NAS (17% for 2017) as a choice for unstructured data.

Data virtualization (23%), Fibre Channel/Ethernet storage networking (26%) and software-defined storage (21%) also rose from last year.

On the flipside, only 16% listed storage virtualization as a priority. That fell from 24% in 2016.

Cloud backup jumped the most from 2016 to 2017 among secondary storage projects, but backup deduplication (30%), backup for virtual servers (43%), continuous data protection (27%) and copy data management (10%) all increased as priorities over 2016.

Storage pros continue to grapple with virtualization, both in primary and secondary systems, among their data storage options. Backup for virtual servers rivaled cloud backup as a top backup priority, with 43% putting it on their 2017 to-do lists compared to 38% a year ago. Storage for virtual environments showed up on 27% of primary storage lists, with data virtualization (23%) not far behind and another 16% planning storage virtualization this year.

The budget outlook for storage managers is a bit rosier this year. Most (50%) said their budgets will increase over 2016. Although 24% said their budgets would be flat and another 16% were not yet sure, only 10% said budgets would decline. Just below 24% said their budget would increase by more than 10%, and another 21% forecasted 5% to 10% increases. In our 2016 survey, 50% said budgets would increase, but 26% expected decreases. And only 16% forecasted increases of more than 10% a year ago.

That means storage managers will have more money to pump into flash and the cloud in 2017.

Check out SMB storage options

Explore pooling, clustered, unified storage systems

Another look at 2017 IT priorities

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Amazon & Microsoft: Are These Cloud Computing Leaders in a Growth Slowdown? – Yahoo Finance

April 5, 2017 | Author: admin

The cloud and cloud computing have become incredible buzzwords. It seems most people are floating around the idea, as the term ambiguously suggests, but dont seem to have a grasp on how the cloud functions.

Believed to be invented by American psychologist and computer scientist J.C.R. Licklider in the 1960s, cloud computing was created to connect data for people between locations and times. Now, this technology has vastly grown and made publicly available by industry leaders Amazon AMZN and Microsoft MSFT.

What is the Cloud?

In basic terms, cloud computing is accessing and storing data over the Internet. To the end user, benefits of the cloud include: the ability to deliver and manage their own computer resources, scale up or scale down computing levels as needed, and only pay for the amount of computing power they use.

Synergy Research Group shows cloud vendor revenues reached $148 billion in 2016, which accounts for 25% annualized growth. Clearly, this is a vast and fast growing space. Leaders in the movement are changing the traditional notion of accessing data through hardware by introducing the idea of retrieving data through space, or the cloud.

At the end of the day, this data needs to be stored somewhere. Companies which offer cloud computing services allocate massive and secure servers to store the data being held in the cloud. Even though cloud data is not being stored in users personal hard drives, is it held somewhere and may be vulnerable to failures.

With the rate of growth this technology is flying at, it seems cloud computing will soon take over the necessities of personal hard drive space. The two popularly known leaders of the cloud computing business are known to be: Amazon with AWS (Amazon Web Service, Inc) and Microsoft with Azure.

How Fast are the Amazon and Microsoft Growing?

Amazons cloud computing service, AWS, launched in 2006. They advertise themselves to deliver large computing capabilities and capacities which cost less and take less time than a company building physical servers. As of 2016, AWS offers more than 70 services.

Year over Year (Y/Y) growth of AWS sales for Amazon were increasing until, and as of now peaked on, Q2 of 2015 at 81%. Since, AWS revenues have been seeing high growth, but not to the level it once did. In Q4 of 2016, Y/Y net sales growth for AWS was 47%.

A similar story is shown with Microsofts Azure. Y/Y revenue growth (GAAP) of their Azure business capped, to date, in Q2 of 2016 at 127% growth. Just like AWS, the later quarters show sales growth at a decreasing rate with Q4 2016 Y/Y revenue growth (GAAP) at 93%.

So Who Cares?

Two of the leaders in cloud computing platforms have not been able to increase their sales growth of their respective cloud businesses. In an industry which is infamous for how fast it is expanding into the hands of businesses and individuals, these numbers are concerning.

It looks like the maximum potential for Amazons and Microsofts sales growth for their cloud computing businesses have capped. Unless either company releases break through cloud computing technology or breaking price points, their sales growth rates look to continually decrease considering current levels.

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3 Cloud Computing Stocks To Buy Right Now – April 4, 2017 – Zacks … – Zacks.com

April 5, 2017 | Author: admin

In the matter of just a few years, the Cloud has evolved from the new feature that your grandmother just cant quite seem to understand to one of the main factors driving growth in the computing sector. Cloud computing is now an essential focus for software-related companies, and cloud stocks have piqued the interest of many tech-focused investors.

New technologies and changing consumer behavior have changed the shape of the technology landscape, and an industry that was once centered on the personal computer has adapted to survive in the world of mobile computing and the Cloud. The markets have been paying attention, and some of the best tech stocks have been those that are either primarily cloud-based companies, or those that have shown growth in their cloud operations.

With this in mind, weve highlighted three stocks that are not only showing strong cloud-related activity, but also strong fundamental metrics. Check out these three cloud stocks to buy right now:

1. Wix.com (WIX - Free Report)

Wix.com is a developer of a cloud-based platform that helps users create online content. Using Wixs tools, one can relatively easily design a webpage or online portfolio. The company recently surpassed the 100 million registered user threshold, and its strength is underscored by its Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) ranking and its impressive EPS and revenue growth projections.

Wixs full-year Zacks Consensus Estimate for earnings has gained 10 cents over the past 30 days, and although it remains a loss-making company, current estimates would represent EPS improvement of nearly 61%. Our consensus estimates also call for sales growth of nearly 43% this year. Looking ahead, the Zacks Consensus Estimate for Wixs fiscal 2018 currently suggests a profit of 35 cents per share.

2. Adobe Systems (ADBE - Free Report)

Adobe Systems is a provider of graphic design, publishing, and imaging software for Web and print production. The companys main offering is its Creative Cloud, which is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) product that allows users to access all of Adobes tools at one monthly price. The stock currently has a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).

Within the last 30 days, we have seen at least one positive estimate revision for Adobes current-quarter, next-quarter, full-year, and next-year earnings. After beating the Zacks Consensus Estimate by an average of nearly 8% in each of the trailing four quarters, Adobe will look to continue its momentum with another impressive report. Our consensus estimate for the quarter call for EPS growth of 40% on sales growth nearly 24%.

3. j2 Global (JCOM - Free Report)

j2 Global provides cloud-based communications and storage messaging services. j2 markets its services principally under the brand names eFax, eVoice, Electric Mail, Campaigner, KeepItSafe and Onebox. The company also provides software-as-a-service communication services and solutions to the business market.

The company has now posted three straight earnings beats, and despite the fact that it is more than 20 years old, our current consensus estimate call for sales growth of over 30% and earnings growth of nearly 15% this year. On top of its Zacks Rank #2 (Buy), j2 has also earned a VGM score of A.

Bottom Line

Cloud-based companies have been some of the best performing stocks in the tech sector this year, and these cloud stocks also boast strong fundamental metrics. If youre looking to add tech stocks to your portfolio right now, this list is probably a good place to start.

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