Due to Brexit, Bitcoin is currently more stable than the British poundSalcido Enterprises has started building a 7.5MW data center in Washington for secure Bitcoin and Ether cryptocurrency mining, as well as data hosting services for high-density conventional and crypto customers.The company secured a a long-term land lease and a long-term power contract with Douglas County Public Utility District that takes advantage of the large amounts of affordable hydroelectric power available in North Central Washington.Pangborn Data Phase 1 aims to be the first of a three facility build-out.“North Central Washington provides the most affordable power in the United States, and some of the lowest cost power in the developed world… Because of our diversification strategy, we are able to offer customers redundant, low-cost consistent power with the advantage of both property development and facilities management,” said Malachi Salcido.“The heart of our long-term business strategy is this: we provide land, power, and connectivity for incremental data space solutions at a fraction of the capital cost of conventional data space options currently on the market.” Salcido Enterprises currently runs 4MW of data spaces in Chelan County, Washington, which it says are 100 percent filled by industrial Bitcoin and Ether miners.

‘Mining’ cryptocurrencies and blockchain-based platforms such as Bitcoin and Ether essentially consists of solving complicated computer problems in return for some of the cryptocurrency.These processing-heavy puzzles have led industrial miners to search for any way to optimize their systems, with the world’s largest liquid cooling set-up being built for digital currency specialist BitFury last year.Miners have also built stripped-back data centers devoid of the usual luxuries such as UPS or security to maximize profit - such as in this barebones facility in Iceland we visited last year.Ensuring a healthy margin is particularly necessary in the field of cryptocurrencies, where stability is far from guaranteed.Bitcoin, introduced by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto, quickly gained prominence with its innovative public ledger blockchain and peer-to-peer transactions, that made it immensely popular with the privacy conscious, those hoping to transfer between countries without paying fees, those looking to purchase illegal products, and currency speculators.

Since being released as open-source software in 2009, Bitcoin has risen and fallen in value (that is, when compared to a conventional fiat currency), as a mixture of genuine promise and hype have led Bitcoin prices to soar, while hacks, scandals and competitors have caused prices to plummet.asic usb litecoin mining rigCurrently, the Bitcoin community is engaged in what some have called (rather hyperbolically) ’a civil war’ over how to deal with the influx of new users that have slowed down transactions and clogged the system.bitcoin gtx 1060In the fierce debate over the currency’s future, some wish to make Bitcoin faster and more user-friendly to appeal to mainstream customers, while others fear the growth will lead to power being monopolized by a few major Bitcoin miners.bitcoin pools url

Last week, Bitcoin also underwent its pre-destined ‘halving’, where every four or so years the amount of new bitcoin created and earned by miners with each new block of transactions is halved.bitcoin milwaukeeEther is the value token of the Ethereum blockchain, which came on the scene just last year, and has been touted as a rival and potential successor to the relatively controversial Bitcoin system.bitcoin technology in pptIn addition to the virtual currency aspect, the still-in-development Ethereum platform provides a way to create online markets and programmable transactions called smart contracts.litecoin machineWhile Ethereum has also seen its fair share of hype and excitement, and has begun to be adopted by some businesses, it suffered its own controversy last month after the Ethereum-based digital decentralized autonomous organization and venture capital fund The DAO was hacked.

The DAO, which had nearly 14 percent of all ether tokens issued to date as of May, lost a third of its Ether funds, worth $50 million.Thousands of Seagate Central network-attached storage (NAS) devices have been found hosting cryptocurrency mining malware called Miner-C which turns them into repositories to infect other devices.According to researchers at Sophos, the malicious software, which was first identified in June quietly infects victims' computers and allows a hacker to covertly mine a cryptocurrency called Monero.Although the researchers note that the threat does not target the Seagate Central device specifically, the device does have a design flaw that allows an attacker to upload malicious files to any device enabled for remote file access.The Seagate Central devices include a publicly accessible folder which cannot be deleted or deactivated.To carry out the breach, the attacker uses a file called Photo.scr, disguised to look like a standard Windows folder icon.However, when a user accidentally clicks on the malicious file, their system is infected with the Monero mining malware that uses misconfigured FTP servers on Seagate Central devices to spread."Since

it generates a new initialisation file when it is launched, it helps the malware avoid security solutions," Attila Marosi, a senior threat researcher at Sophos, wrote."It also gives the botnet operators a chance to change the payload of the threat in the future, for example, dropping ransomware to the victim's machine after the mining business is no longer profitable."Inthe first six month of 2016, the security firm has seen around 1.7 million Mal/Miner-C detections from around 3,000 different IP addresses.Marosi also noted that 2.1 million IP addresses were found to be actively hosting FTP servers of which 7,263 had write access enabled and 5,137 were contaminated with Mal/Miner-C.As Bitcoin becomes increasingly harder to mine than newer cryptocurrencies, Marosi says cybercriminals have opted for other digitial currencies that are "new, profitable and significantly less difficult to mine" such as Monero.Marosi estimates that hackers have raked in around €76,000 (£64,000) using the malware."More