What Are the Investment Returns on Bitcoin Mining
You know about Bitcoin: The original digital currency based on blockchain. Every transaction is written to a shared ledger and verified by the rest of the network. Each set of approved transactions is a “block” added to the chain.
But you may have missed the buzz on Bitcoin mining. It’s not just for web geeks or digital currency traders. There are thousands of people around the world looking to profit in this way.
What is Bitcoin Mining?
Participants try to guess a random number generated by the system. Those who get the answer “own” the next block of transactions and collect a reward; currently 12.5 bitcoins. If you manage this, you can also collect fees on transactions in the block you created.
This number comes from a complex equation. In the early days it was handled by ordinary computers, and then GPUs (graphics processing units), which were better suited to the task. Over the years the equation has evolved in difficulty to regulate the rate of discovery.
Technology
Bitcoin miners now rely on hardware-intensive systems known as ASICs (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit), which appeared in 2013. If you own or can get access to such a system, you stand to guess a fair amount of numbers on the blocks constantly taking shape.
If this sounds like an easy way to profit, it is. Many people have joined the ranks of digital currency miners. However, with so much competition, the big question is whether there are still decent profits to be made.
Can You Still Make Money?
The more computers that are trying to capture the number, the harder the equation becomes and the fewer numbers you get.
But Bitcoins also tend to go up in value. It was a price spike in 2013 that launched mining as a popular investment option. Speculators agree that the value of Bitcoin should continue rising as its popularity grows.
Investments Required
To maximize your return on Bitcoin mining, you need an ASIC system. These computing solutions utilize high-end hardware that generates a lot of heat. Such a setup requires state-of-the-art cooling and ventilation systems along with higher utility bills to operate all of this.
Without an ASIC of your own, your odds of scoring aren’t good. It is possible to save some money by leasing an ASIC rather than buying one outright.
Other Options
Fortunately for the smaller investor, recent years have seen the rise of cloud mining, or cloud hashing. This response to growing demand is basically another cloud service where you get to lease a portion of someone else’s ASCI-enabled data center.
A cheaper option, albeit with smaller potential rewards, is a mining pool. This is a third-party service that uses investor funds to do their own mining and shares out the profits. The upside of this is that you don’t need technical or financial knowledge at all; you just need to come up the minimum investment required by the service.
Profit Potential
You can join some of these investment pools for as little as $500. Some of these third-party services state that you could earn your investment back in as little as two months or so, and start seeing profit after three. When these claims are legit, or even close to it, you’re seeing a remarkable and fairly consistent ROI better than most forms of investment.
However, transaction fees are currently voluntary on the part of individual users of Bitcoin, as is whether the transaction should even be included in a block. This is encouraged as the transaction is more quickly verified if it’s part of a block. Even so, your profit depends on the current value of Bitcoin, the number and size of transaction fees involved, and the number of people sharing the rewards.
Federal Regulation
In 2015 the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) declared that digital currency trading is legal and subject to fair trading laws. However, this doesn’t guarantee that you’re protected. Prudent investors always do the homework: Know who you’re dealing with and determine realistic expectations.
Risks in Bitcoin Mining
The Bitcoin reward is halved every 210,000 blocks, or about four years. As the reward approaches zero, it may not be profitable at all unless transaction fees are increased and enforced. And while the general trend is up, there’s also fluctuation in Bitcoin value.
There’s also a question of integrity. As more cloud services spring up, you’ll have a widely varying scenario of payouts, contract stipulations, and the potential for dishonest reporting; even outright fraud. Also, on the downside: The IRS says that mining profits may be taxed as individual investment gains!
Is Bitcoin mining still a good investment? At the present time, yes, and hopefully for years to come with appropriate changes. Are you ready to sit back and let the computers make you bitcoins?
Jen McKenzie is an independent business consultant from New York. She writes extensively on business, education and human resource topics. When Jennifer is not at her desk working, you can usually find her hiking or taking a road trip with her two dogs. You can reach Jennifer @jenmcknzie
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UASF Bitcoin: a Crypto Guide for Beginners and not
Yesterday we published the image below on Facebook, related to UASF Bitcoin we support. But what does it mean?
What is UASF Bitcoin?
UASF is an abbreviation that stands for User Activated Soft Fork.
It’s a mechanism for the activation of a soft fork that might occur on a specified time enforced by full nodes, a concept that is also called “economic majority”.
In the past years, a UASF was successfully developed to activate the P2SH soft fork (BIP16).
Instead, currently, the UASF is combined with the so-called SegWit activation in the BIP148 proposal you can read here: github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0148.mediawiki.
What is a MASF?
MASF means Miner Activated Soft Fork. It’s a system by which miners can trigger the activation of a soft fork when a majority decides to execute an upgrade. This allows a faster activation of the soft fork, leaving full nodes to upgrade when they decide to do it.
This mechanism is a tradeoff because it puts trust in the hash power, enforcing the new rules. Conversely, it can cause invalid chains. This was the case with BIP66.
What is BIP148?
BIP148 is a UASF designed to run the current SegWit MASF deployment in order to activate it in all the existing SegWit capable node software (80% + at this time).
From August 1st, 2017, miners have to signal their readiness for SegWit creating blocks with the version bit 1.
What is Segwit?
SegWit is an upgrade to the bitcoin blockchain that might be able to solve the so-called block size debate, by increasing the capacity of each block of the digital currency chain in order to allow more transactions in less time and with fewer fees to be executed and registered on the blockchain itself.
Right now, Bitcoin supports up to 2000 transactions per block in 10 minutes, but SegWit will be able to double this capacity up to 4000 transactions.
Read this infographic to know more about SegWit.
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How to buy Bitcoin with bank account
How to buy bitcoin with bank accounts? Read this step-by-step guide to convert your fiat currencies into your favorite digital currency.
We recently opened a new service called HolyTransaction Trade where you can buy and sell bitcoins.
This is an important feature when you need to buy or sell bitcoin immediately. You just need to create an account on HolyTransaction Trade but you can use any wallet, not only HolyTransaction.
You just need to visit HolyTransaction Trade and follow the process you can read below.
This guide will enable you to buy bitcoin with bank account.
- Visit trade.holytransaction.com;
- Select your input method (bank transfer in this case) and your output method (bitcoin);
- Click on the blue “Continue” button;
- Fill the form with your personal information: wallet to receive bitcoins, email to send the invoice, password, and amount of euros to be sent (max 600 EUR).
5. If you already have an account on HolyTransaction Trade you need to fill the form with your email and password. Conversely, you need to create a new account, so you need to click on “Register a new one” as shown in the picture below and confirm the link you will receive via email.
6. Then, if you are creating a new account, you need to provide your ID card. This process of verification will last a couple of minutes.
6. Then you will need to pay the amount of Euros you decided, so you need to order the bank transfer from your bank account. You will see the IBAN where you need to send the fiat currency to.
7. Then you will see a countdown that starts from 48h. At the end of that, the operation will be completed. You will see a similar image as shown below:
NOTE: the max amount you need to buy daily is 600 EUR. Bank transfer needs 48h to be received.
Fees are 2%.
Open your account on HolyTransaction Trade here
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Bitcoin regulation in Europe: “it’s too early”
During a recent event held by the European Parliament, members talked about new technologies including the Blockchain and Ethereum and Bitcoin Regulation.
According to them, the European Parliament will have to regulate and monitor the new tech but “it’s too early to intervene at this stage, because we as legislators don’t yet see sufficiently clearly to know what the main issues are going to be – so in order to not to stifle innovation, we don’t want it to be now.””, said MEP Jakob von Weizsäcker.
So, the EU wants just to monitor blockchain and smart contracts in order to allow developers doing their job.
Also, MEP Eva Kaili from Greece explained that regulation is necessary to protect citizens, but EU doesn’t want to suffocate innovations.
“[In] 2008 when the crisis started in the European Union, especially in my country [Greece], people lost trust in banks and in the politicians. I woundn’t blame them because we didn’t protect them and the reaction was that some young people that we don’t really know discover this technology that actually makes unnecessary to have banks, politicians and intermediaries. So the potential is there, but it is still under progress”.
Also, she continues by saying the following:
“Blockchain is not just bitcoin and bitcoin is not just blockckhain. We need to understand how to protect citizens because if we help them trust this technology, they will actually start to using it. I do believe that banks will outsource a lot of their services,” she said.
Bitcoin regulation to regain trust by citizens
“We’ll have to educate citizens on how to use it […] Hopefully, [bitcoin regulation] will come and we’re going to try to protect the technology and not to stop it. I know that usually politicians and banks don’t want to change and they want to keep control, but I think this technology is unstoppable and we have to give control back to the citizens and maybe this way we can regain some trust,” Kaili argues.
Watch the full conference video here.
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Litecoin Segwit has been finally approved
Litecoin Segwit has been finally implemented, so this long-debate to change to change the digital currency network can be said to be closed now.
Originally intended to improve the bitcoin blockchain, Segwit – or Segregated Witness – had to solve the so-called block size debate, but it has been used on the lesser known litecoin chain, with some in the community that believes that it will help to finally have a quick implementation on the bitcoin network too.
Litecoin Segwit: how does it work?
Segregated Witness, in fact, is a new system that will allow litecoin to improve its block size, by modifying how transaction data is stored by the blockchain itself.
The change was first locked-in two weeks ago, when the proposal reached the 75% threshold level.
Then, the community had to wait two more weeks (8,064 blocks) to ensure that the upgrade approval was consistent.
After that, yesterday (on May 10th) the change was officially activated at block 1201536.
What does it mean?
Litecoin users can now start using a new kind of network, and there has been at least one transaction so far.
Anyway, several supporters are thrilled about the new techs that can now be created on the Segwit-supported network.
For example, the Lightning Network could boost litecoin transactions by million times; thanks to Segwit it can now be used to move real money.
Developer Loshan T explained to CoinDesk:
“I think today will be a great day for pushing more awesome tech into Litecoin. With SegWit activated on litecoin’s mainnet, I cannot wait until we deploy confidential transactions, Lightning Networks, MAST and Schnorr signatures.”
Unfortunately, these projects are early stage right now, but developers from the Lightning Labs seem thinking that it is too early to talk about sending money over an experimental network, so they plan to continue to develop the chain.
The future is unwritten
It not so clear where the Segwit activation will lead to or what role Litecoin will have in the next future.
Loshan explained that some in the community are skeptical about litecoin needs of the Lightning Network tech because litecoin blocks are not full yet, but they would like to have trustless cross-chain transactions between bitcoin and litecoin as a potential Lightning use case; and developer believes could be a benefit for both the digital currencies.
Anyway, at the moment, the Litecoin blockchain seems to work properly, without any issue, even after the Segwit activation.
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Decred: the younger brother of Bitcoin
Decred (DCR) is a digital currency created back in 2015 by Bitcoin’s BTCSuite developers, an alternative full node bitcoin implementation written in Go.
“Decred uses a hybridized consensus system to strike a balance between miners and users to create a more robust currency”, as it was created both with proof of work (PoW) and with proof of stake (PoS).
This hybrid consensus system allows users to create a balance between proof-of-work miners and proof-of-stake users in order to have a much more robust consensus.
This relatively new cryptocurrency aims at addressing issues related to the increasing centralization of power within the bitcoin blockchain and the growing conflict of interest between the bitcoin community and those who fund the Bitcoin core project.
Also, it is important to say that Decred can be both mined and staked.
Why is another cryptocurrency needed?
When Bitcoin was originally released, it was working in a market that didn’t exist before. There were issues that could be fixed thanks to new digital currencies such as Litecoin or Dogecoin.
Of course, time is showing that Bitcoin is not a failure at all and it radically changed the idea of money.
Decred has several new features in order to combine the very best of proof-of-work and proof-of-stake chains with the main objective of utilising both systems in Decred.
Also, Decred defines itself as “self-funded and progressive” and it relies completely on a community governance and opensource features.
Decred developer Christina Jepson explained:
“The intention is not to attack what we currently have in Bitcoin. We want to recognize what has been done well, but instead, we want to take that and improve on what we think can be done better… That is the spirit that started the technology and we want to return to that to explore options to problems we cannot explore in the current system while we continue to support the Bitcoin software. Alternatives are progress and a way forward to improve the greater ecosystem.”
Decred Wallet
That said, if you want to start buying and selling Decred coins, you will need the right wallet to store them properly.
Recently, we at HolyTransaction added a new wallet on our platform in order to allow you to store your Decred right behind your bitcoin and more than other 20 digital currencies.
Within the same login, in fact, you can store all your cryptocurrencies in a safe place with low fees.
Open here your new wallet to store, buy and sell your favorite coins.
Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.
Ether price is reaching its all time highs
Ether price, or the digital currency that fuels the Ethereum blockchain, is approaching its all-time highs set last year.
In fact, price of ether rose of about 60% during last week, hitting $20.67 yesterday, after opening at $13 on February 25th.
Ether price and Ethereum Enterprise
This increase might be the result of the official launch of Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, a new working group focused on the Ethereum blockchain with important members including Microsoft, JP Morgan, Santader, etc.
This consortium has the main goal of using the ethereum tech within enterprise-grade blockchain implementations.
So this recent news may have led to the increase of confidence in the technology and in the linked digital currency.
Digital currencies are growing
Recently bitcoin price is also growing, reaching its all time highs, together with the altcoin called Dash.
Among the others, bitcoin is undoubtedly the most used and known with a robust trading volume and bullish market sentiment.
Bitcoin has risen to several new highs in recent days, after failing to set new higher levels for more than three years. Also, bitcoin hits parity with the per-ounce price of gold last week.
Dash has rose more than 75% in the last week and upwards of 200% over the last month. In fact, the previously called Darkcoin reached its all-time high of $58.90 on 2nd March.
Multicurrency wallet for differentiated investments
If you want to invest in all these three digital currencies, you need a multicurrency wallet to store bitcoin, dash and ether coins at the same time.
Normally, if you want to have store different cryptocurrencies, you need to have ten different wallets, which is difficult to manage. Instead,thanks to HolyTransaction you can solve this problem, unifying everything in a single account.
For more info and fees (HolyTransaction has a fixed-rate exchange) click here.
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Polish Bitcoin regulators recognized it within the country
Polish Bitcoin regulators decided to recognize the digital currency within the country.
In fact, the country’s Central Statistical Office (GUS) revealed its decision to recognize the trading and mining of digital currencies as an official economic business in Poland.
This is the reason why from now on companies active in the Polish industry are be able to register themselves with the agency.
Businesses who are involved in cryptocurrency trade and production activities can now apply to obtain an official PKD 64.19.Z registration, the GUS explained in a press release.
This news highlights a significant step forward for industry workers in Poland where currently there isn’t an official regulation or legislation about neither bitcoin or other digital currencies.
Earlier this year the Polish Ministry of Finance released a few documents that expressed the status of legality for bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general.
Also, in a statement published back in November, the finance ministry commented what follows:
“there is a lack of a general, legal definition of virtual currency in international, European and national law”.
This explains that digital currencies are subjected to income tax, even if they are not subject to any separate regulation according to the Polish legislation.
Polish ministry also commented:
“It should also be stressed here that their use in Poland is fully legal.”
Polish Bitcoin studies
To explore the legal and financial implications of the use of the Polish Bitcoin use, government of Poland has created a new group of blockchain and virtual currencies experts.
This Polish Bitcoin task force was established under the surveilance of the Polish Ministry of Digital Affairs, and according to thePolish government’s program titled “From Paper To Digital Poland“ that was written by the Cabinet back in June 2016.
This task force will be responsible to prepare analyses for use by other government agencies in their legislative work and the possible chance of a Polish Bitcoin and digital currencies regulation is one of its goals and interests.
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Bitcoin Prices are trading above $950
Bitcoin prices are growing more than 3% since yesterday, trading above $950 for the first time in a few weeks.
The average price yesterday reached a high of $959.37 from an open of $920.24, according to the CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index (BPI). This chart shows that the Bitcoin prices haven’t passed $950 for a month, since January 6th 2017, to be more exact.
This Bitcoin prices growth above $950 came after a few days of a almost steady trading, in which the price of bitcoin ranged between roughly $910 and $922, according to trading data.
At the moment, the Bitcoin Prices are between $950 and $970 with a medium rate of volatility.
Chinese markets have climbed about 11%, reaching a high of ¥6,629.34.
Currently the price is about ¥6,608.70 and it represents a growth of 10.7% above yesterday’s open of ¥5,961.77.
This move comes after a big news in the worldwide exchange landscape, as major bourses in China moved to add trading fees.
This is the reason why volumes moved to the remaining markets without any fees.
Anyway, experts now discuss that this trend will have a short life as those exchanges will also add fees of their own for sure in the next future.
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China Blockchain project for a new digital currency
People’s Bank of China (PBOC) is working on a China Blockchain project for a new digital currency.
According to an article published by Caixin yesterday, the People’s Bank of China completed a project on 15th December during which it tested how transactions could work by using a custom blockchain system.
The test was held together with major Chinese commercial banks including Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), Bank of China and WeBank.
The official press release reports:
“The bank suggested the digital currency would not only reduce circulation costs but also increase transparency and curb money laundering and tax evasion.”
Also, the official report just released explained that the new China Blockchain digital currency might be connected to the Shanghai Commercial Paper Exchange to create a “national platform for bank bill transactions”.
Together with this new project the PBOC will also open a digital currency research institute for which it is looking for experts in big data, fintech, cryptography and distributed ledger technology.
The official report shared by the PBOC governor Zhou Xiaochuan in February, also explained that the central bank was considering the distributed ledger as one of a few different technologies that can be allow it to create a new form of digital cash.
Also, this project coincides with the current PBOC’s investigations into the most important bitcoin exchanges of the country, an operation that started in January and that has seen several startups doing a few changes to trading policies.
Read more news about the China Blockchain projects by clicking here.
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