Intel Core X AMD EPYC Ethereum Core i9-7900X Cryptocurrency Vega home News NVIDIA Allegedly Readying Headless Pascal Crypto-Mining GPUs For Ethereum, Bitcoin And Others The so-called cryptocurrency market is booming, or at least parts of it are.One of the most popular digital currencies is Bitcoin.It recently topped the $3,000 mark for the first time since its debut in 2009, and had you owned just $27 worth at that time, you'd be sitting on $15,000,000.While volatile, the price just keeps going up over time.This has kept the mining market alive, and NVIDIA reportedly plans to capitalize on it by releasing specialized Pascal cards tuned specifically for digging up crytocurrencies.News of NVIDIA's plans can be found all over the web, though most reports trace back to a couple of sources.One is a tech site called Goldfries that claims it received word that a dedicated mining GPU is in the works and that it will arrive around the middle of next month.

These specialized graphics cards will not have any display outputs because they're not meant for gaming, graphics work, or anything that requires a monitor.The mining version of this card will not have any display outputs.At least one of the GPUs is said to be based on NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1060 graphics card with 6GB of GDDR5 memory.It will stick to reference clocks with base and boost clockspeeds set at 1,506MHz and 1,708MHz, respectively, though add-in board partners may opt to overclock.The card will take up two expansion slots, just as a regular GeForce GTX 1060, and will be backed by a three-month warranty.Pricing is expected to be around $200, which is around $50 less than the regular variant.Here is a look at that card: Image Source: Expreview As you can see, it doesn't look like the gaming variant.It features a custom PCB and has a passive cooling solution that consists of a finned aluminum block.There is no active blower on this card; keeping it cool will require adequate airflow in a chassis and/or an open-air configuration.

It's also said that NVIDIA is working on a mining card based on its more powerful GeForce GTX 1080 GPU.NVIDIA is also sticking to reference clocks with this one—1,60MHz base and 1,733MHz boost—though it remains to be seen if its AIB partners offer overclocked models.Either way, these cards will be optimized for cryptocurrency mining.Pricing will start at $350, versus $499 for gaming models.Image Source: WCCFTech Whether or not some variants come with active cooling is not yet known.Either way, expect board partners such as MSI, Inno3D, and others to get in on the action with specialized cards for miners.One of the other main sources of leaks on this subject is Videocardz, a rumor site that is hit or miss when it comes to this sort of thing.The site claims that dedicated mining systems will be offered with specialized graphics cards inside.One of them will feature a mobile Celeron processor paired with 4GB of DDR3 RAM and a 64GB mSATA solid state drive.Everything will housed in a sturdy enclosure that resists dusts and has plenty of airflow to keep temperatures in check.

These cards and rigs will used to mine Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other similar crytpocurrencies.If you haven't heard of it before, Ethereum is a newer type of digital currency that is attracting considerable attention among miners as of late.litecoin coreEthereum's value has skyrocketed since being introduced two years ago and it now has a market cap of more than $34.5 billion, compared to Bitcoin's market cap of $42.4 billion.litecoin mining with old computerblog comments powered bybitcoin error failed to read blockHold 'em, don't fold 'em: How to bite Bitcoin pools Boffins demo withholding attack that could work on one ASIC and make an Evil Genius™ rich Bitcoin's reward mechanism is based on publishing a solution to the block chain.litecoin shop online

What if an Evil Genius™ reversed this, and rewarded miners for withholding their solutions?The simple answer: a pool of miners in which an Evil Genius™ withheld solutions would collapse.bitcoin pool apiThe surprise longer answer, presented in this paper at the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), is that the attacker could conceivably end up in the black.bitcoin api poolYaron Velner (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Jason Teutsch (University of Alabama at Birmingham) and Loi Luu (National University of Singapore) write that the problem arises in the mining pools that now account for most Bitcoin computation (as much as 95 per cent by some estimates).the bitcoin coop“Withholding attacks” have been discussed since early in the blockchain's history, but Bitcoin's pretty resilient against them because if you want to mine coins and not tell anyone, you need enough computing power to be a miner.bitcoin value in 2020

That means a lot of outlay for a slim return.Rewarding others to withhold, the Velner/Teutsch/Luu paper suggests, is a lot more affordable, for the following reasons: “In this work we propose to pay other miners to withhold blocks … an attacker with only 0.0000002% of Bitcoin’s computation power can reduce the revenue of a big pool to zero without any financial losses on his side.active bitcoin poolsIn fact the theoretical outcome of our attack (if miners are fully rational) is equivalent to a classical block withholding attack in which a miner rents Bitcoin’s entire hash power and withholds all the blocks that he finds.” As they say on Twitter, “huge if true” – so let's drill down a little.Nakamoto's original paper (PDF) mentions block withholding attacks as “an attacker trying to generate an alternate chain faster than the honest chain”.Block withholding has been typically regarded as a double-spending attack.

This paper, instead, is a manipulation of the value of Bitcoin held in pools.Each time a Bitcoin is successfully mined (that is, someone's rig finds the next solution), the math gets a little bit harder, and the next solution will take longer, or it'll need more computing power to find.That's why Bitcoin mining is now conducted in data centres and dedicated servers, rather than at home on PCs.If blocks aren't published, they're not included in the assumption that makes Bitcoin progressively more difficult, and the result is that the attacker “benefits from reducing the effective hash rate of the entire network”.Only if, however, they can do it for a small outlay – and that's where this attack is different.Instead of doing the mining themselves, an attacker with a modest home-scale setup can disrupt pools.The requirement, the authors write, is merely that the “the fraction of the network’s hash rate controlled by the attacker” is greater than “a miner’s reward for submitting a full solution to the pool”.

“This mining power is currently equivalent to 4 TH/s [tera-hashes per second – El Reg] mining power, which is obtainable by modern ASICs.Moreover, a miner with N ASICs could offer a reward that is N times higher and still make a profit.” Were an Evil Genius™ to mount the attack, they'd need their minions to prove they're holding valid blocks, and that's one reason withholding attacks don't happen: storage sufficient for the minion to submit a proof to the attacker is expensive.Instead, the attack asks only for the minion for a “proof of stale work” – to prove that they're “performing sha256 operations over some data without an intention of submitting full solutions to the blockchain.When the withholder allocates his mining equipment for stale work, the effective hash power of the network is reduced.” Crucially, because it's an attack on the pool mining protocol, the authors note that their attack does not affect the “Nakamoto consensus” that protects the “truth” of the Bitcoin blockchain.