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A disused coal power station will reopen to solely power crypto
A closed-down coal plant in Australia's Hunter Valley, about a two-hour drive north of Sydney, is reopening in order to provide inexpensive power for Bitcoin miners. A tech company called IOT Group has partnered with the local power company to revive the power plant and set up cryptocurrency mining operations, called a Blockchain Operations Centre, inside it. This would give the group direct access to energy at wholesale prices.
A New York town just placed a moratorium on crypto mining
As cryptocurrency becomes a more important force in the world market, more companies are cropping up to mine it. And that, in turn, is becoming a problem for places where these miners are setting up. The town of Plattsburgh, New York, has become the first in the US to place a moratorium on cryptocurrency mining. It's not an outright ban, at least not yet -- it doesn't affect miners currently operating in the city, just new ones looking to set up shop, and it's only in place for 18 months.
Kodak slaps its name on a sketchy bitcoin-mining business
Kodak's attempt to ride the cryptocurrency wave isn't limited to offering its own virtual coins. CES attendees have learned that Kodak has attached its name to a Spotlite-run bitcoin-mining business that will lease you a Kodak KashMiner computer for a two-year contract. It'll cost you $3,400 plus half of the value the machines earn, but Spotlite argues that it's effectively a license to print money. If you believe the company's math, you'd be paid $375 per month if bitcoin maintains an average price of $14,000. However, there's just one problem: The math ignores the very nature of how bitcoin works.
AMD and NVIDIA go after Bitcoin miners with new video cards
Dedicated digital currency miners know the importance of good graphics cards -- modern GPUs have enough general-purpose computing power to process money formats like Bitcoin much faster than a CPU alone. They've never really been suited for non-stop number crunching, though, and it looks like both AMD and NVIDIA hope to change that. CNBC has discovered that ASUS is making currency mining-oriented video cards using both vendors' chipsets. The AMD-based Mining RX 470 and NVIDIA-based Mining P106 are ultimately using off-the-shelf GPUs (the RX 470 and GTX 1060 respectively), but are fine-tuned for running around the clock.
Go on a bitcoin spending spree in the next Steam sale
Both high-end gaming PCs and bitcoin mining rigs require an awful lot of power to operate at their best, so this next bit of news is a pretty natural fit: You can load your Steam wallet using Silk Road's favorite currency. Cryptocurrency payment processing outfit Bitpay says that Valve approached the company because the gaming juggernaut was looking for a way to process payments in emerging markets like Brazil, China and India. Meaning, countries where credit cards aren't easily accessible.
Live from the Engadget CES Stage: KnCMiner
What better way to send off CES 2014 than with some Bitcoin talk? KnCMiner, the Swedish company behind a number of high profile Bitcoin mining machines will join us for our final on-stage CES interview of the year. January 10, 2014 7:30:00 PM EST
