Cryptocurrency forks of various types now take place on a regular basis. Even bitcoin has experienced several different iterations and branches in this way. One of the largest and most discussed bitcoin forks took place late in 2017.

Bitcoin gold was a hard fork of the original open source cryptocurrency which took place on October 24, 2017. While hard forks take place for a number of reasons – including for the purposes of scaling as a cryptocurrency customer base grows, or because of developer conflict and differences of goals – bitcoin gold's stated purpose has been to "make bitcoin decentralized again."

On the surface, the idea of "making bitcoin decentralized again" may seem counterintuitive. Bitcoin ... Read more »

All popular bitcoin payment services offer multiple mediums for merchants to accept bitcoin payments. They include solutions for various platforms, like integration with e-commerce platforms like Shopify, PrestaShop, and Magento; for payment through in-store point-of-sale (POS) systems, like Soft Touch and DC POS; and for direct payments from within the popular billing and accounting solutions, like Host Bill and Invoice Ninja.

One can also find solutions for accepting donations in bitcoins through such services, which include integration with donor services like NationBuilder and Targeted Victory. App developers can find ready-made functions and code libraries in Android SDK and iOS SDK, and in programming languages like Java, Perl, and PHP, which enable them t ... Read more »

Bitcoin is a decentralized, peer-to-peer cryptocurrency system designed to allow online users to process transactions through digital units of exchange called bitcoins (BTC). Started in 2009 by a mysterious entity named Satoshi Nakamoto, the Bitcoin network has come to dominate and even define the cryptocurrency space, spawning a legion of altcoin followers and representing for many users an alternative to government flat currencies like the U.S. dollar or the euro or pure commodity currencies like gold or silver coins.

Why the need for bitcoin in the first place, if there are already so many traditional means of making payments? A key element of bitcoin is its decentralized status, meaning that it is not controlled or regulated by any central authority. This i ... Read more »

Actual Bitcoin units are stored in “wallets” – secure cloud storage locations with special information confirming their owners (Bitcoin users) as the guardians of the Bitcoin units contained within. Though wallets like Coinbase theoretically protect against the theft of Bitcoin units that aren’t currently being used, they’re vulnerable to hacking – particularly public wallets used by Bitcoin exchanges, online marketplaces, and specialized websites that exist solely to store Bitcoin wallets known as “wallet services.”

The largest and most notorious Bitcoin hack involved wallets held by Mt. Gox, a Japanese Bitcoin exchange that shut down after hackers stole hundreds of millions of dollars in Bitcoin (in contemporary ... Read more »

Bitcoin’s block chain is vital to its function. The block chain is a public, distributed ledger of all prior Bitcoin transactions, which are stored in groups known as blocks. Every node of Bitcoin’s software network – the server farms and terminals, run by individuals or groups known as miners, whose efforts to produce new Bitcoin units result in the recording and authentication of Bitcoin transactions, and the periodic creation of new blocks – contains an identical record of Bitcoin’s block chain.

Because new Bitcoin transactions constantly occur, the Bitcoin block chain, though finite, grows over time. As long as miners continue their work and record recent transactions, the Bitcoin block chain will always be a work in progress. In other words, there’s no predetermined length at which the block chain will ... Read more »

Cloud mining is an often misunderstood investment solution.
While searching on the internet, we realized that the opinions were often very positive or very negative. Without taking a position, we will in the following paragraphs present the advantages and disadvantages of this solution in order to define, finally, today, to whom this mining formula is addressed.

Advantages

We mentioned some of them earlier when we explained how cloud mining came about. Here, we have selected the main advantages of this solution:

- Start with a reasonable investment
We believe that this is the main advantage of Cloud Mining. Becoming the owner of a mining machine is a relatively heavy investment that is not within everyone ... Read more »

Cloud mining is well known for its flexibility and its ease of use. Situated at the gates of classic mining, the access to hash power has never been easier than it has been since the cloud has been around. Gone are the days of worrying about the capacity, reliability and performance of mining hardware. Cloud mining is a new fetish that will appeal to the general public.
According to the digital age, the cloud has a bright future ahead of it. Those who were terminated from yesterday's mining could be seduced by today's cloud. Subjected to animated debates within the community because of the Ponzi pyramids built around it, the history of the cloud goes before a long experience where cloud mining will finally interfere. Turnkey solutions that are ideal for an audience new to cryptoactives but whose contours will have to be addressed. For now, let's move the pa ... Read more »

These days, everyone entering the world of mining cryptocurrencies will have to compete with big companies and their mining farms. So, naturally, one of the first decisions that every aspiring miner has to make is whether to go solo or join a ‘pool’.

Pooled mining is a mining approach where multiple users contribute their computing power to the generation of the block. A pool has a much bigger chance of solving a block and getting a reward, although that reward will be split between the members according to the contributed processing power. So, joining a pool might create a steady stream of income, even though each payment will be quite modest compared to a full block reward.

Joining a pool works just like signing up to to any other web servi ... Read more »

What is mining?

Mining is a process of adding transaction records to the Bitcoin’s public ledger, called the Blockchain. It exists so that every transaction can be confirmed, and every single user of the network can access this ledger. It is also used to distinguish legitimate Bitcoin transactions from attempts at re-spending money that has already been spent somewhere else.

Essentially, miners are serving the Bitcoin community by confirming every transaction and making sure that every single one of them is legitimate. Every time a new block is ‘sealed off’, a miner gets a reward. As of October 2017, the bounty stands at 12.5 Bitcoins per block.

The rate at which new coins appear resembles the rate at which ... Read more »

Bitcoin is a type of digital currency which operates outside the mandate of a central authority. There are several variants of the cryptocurrency which have resulted from forks. These include bitcoin cash, bitcoin gold and bitcoin diamond. This article focuses predominantly on bitcoin.

Bitcoin was created by a person or group of people under the name Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009. It was intended to be used as a method of payment free from government supervision, transfer delays or transactions fees. However, most businesses and consumers are yet to adopt bitcoin as a form of payment, and it’s currently far too volatile to provide a legitimate alternative to traditional currencies.

Primarily, bitcoin is now used as a form of investment. I ... Read more »