Friday, March 4. As the week comes to an end, we can focus on the highlights of the crypto industry over the past few days.
The media reported the superiority of Intel bitcoin miners over competitors
In February, Intel unveiled its first bitcoin mining chip and offered customers a device with 15% higher efficiency than the market leaders.
The corporation showcased the Bonanza Mine chip and a prototype miner based on it at the international ISSCC conference. Intel’s spokesperson stated that the equipment provides energy efficiency of 55 J/TH at a hash rate of 47 TH/s. The performance is on par with Bitfury and Canaan devices, but significantly underperforming the flagships MicroBT and Bitmain.
Some time prior to the event, the company listed Block Jack Dorsey, mining companies Argo Blockchain and GRIID Infrastructure among its first customers.
In the prospectus of the latter, which was filed with the SEC before going public, journalists discovered information about the future supply of miners with significantly superior characteristics than what was announced at the presentation.
The publication assumed that this is equipment on the chip Bonanza Mine second generation from Intel. Although the manufacturer is not identified explicitly as a supplier, it is said to be the “leading U.S.-based chip designer”.
GRIID has announced the cost of the new miner at $5,625, which is about half the price of the S19 Pro at $10,455.
Tom’s Hardware points out that the cheaper price of the device for the American company can be justified by lower logistics costs, a shorter supply chain and the absence of import duties. It is not known what the technological superiority is achieved by.
Bitcoin’s carbon footprint spiked by 17%
Joule magazine published a study revealing that after Chinese miners left the country, the bitcoin network’s carbon emissions surged by 17%.
In May 2021, the PRC’s share of the first cryptocurrency hash rate was 44%, according to information from the CCAF (Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance). In late summer, the figure dropped to zero, and USA became the leader. Also, Kazakhstan, Canada, and Russia have noticeably increased their shares.
A considerable number of experts believed that the migration of miners from the PRC made the bitcoin network more decentralized and eco-friendly.
As per the Bitcoin Mining Council, the share of green energy in global digital gold mining has reached 56%. Despite this, the crypto community questioned the organization’s insights.
The authors of the “Revisiting Bitcoin’s Carbon Footprint” study confirmed the doubts – in August 2021 the share of renewable energy plunged from 41.6% in 2020 to 25.1%.
Most agreed that Chinese miners were more renewable-energy-driven than most of the leading players in the industry now.
MetaMask: don’t rely on a lavish airdrop if a token is released
MetaMask does not omit the probable emergence of its own token. However, the company implores users not to count on a generous airdrop.
“We really believe in progressive decentralization, gradually moving toward it in meaningful ways that are not just about raking in money,” informed Jacob Cantale, lead of operations for the project.
Cantale called his own token “an important aspect” of MetaMask’s commitment to handing over control of the project to the community. However, he stressed that users should not expect an enormous financial benefit.
“It’s not something that we’re going to wing. And it’s also not something where we’re going to put our project in jeopardy of either regulators or give governance to ‘airdrop farmers’ or something like that,” Canale explained.
In May 2021, DeFi-project Ribbon Finance held a token airdrop, but the assets were only unlocked by October. The developers set up the distribution so that the “smaller contributors” would get more benefit from the distribution.
As you might recall, in November 2021, Joseph Lubin, head of ConsenSys, the owner of MetaMask, hinted that the non-custodial wallet could have its own token. He highlighted that the team is moving toward decentralization of “several projects.”
Hackers called on Nvidia to remove the hash rate restriction and menaced to disclose data
LAPSUS$, a ransomware group, says it is ready to release or sell 1 TB of stolen sensitive data if the video card manufacturer does not remove the mining restrictions in the new, 30th RTX series.
Unless Nvidia satisfies their solution, LAPSUS$ will disclose schematics, drivers, and other “very valuable to Nvidia” internal data. Hackers explain such actions as a wish “to help the mining and gaming community.”
For a week, the attackers managed to gain access to Nvidia servers with the administrator’s key.
Since February 2021, Nvidia has rolled out an updated Lite Hash Rate line of RTX 3000 graphics cards, for which it has halved the device’s power when mining Ethereum. As a result, the company planned to adapt the GPU based on the needs of gamers.