Bayan Token(BYT)

[PRESS RELEASE – Cayman, Cayman Islands, January 18th, 2024] zbyte, the premium Web3 infrastructure platform, is proud to announce the launch of its mainnet and the DPLAT token, a significant milestone in bridging the gap between Web2 and Web3 technologies. zbyte is backed by prominent investors like Cartography Capital and Quarterback Financial. The zbyte mainnet […]

zbyte’s decentralized platform goes mainnet, launches DPLAT utility token

The buyer explained that the inscription was created on January 15 at 1 sat/vB (satoshi per byte) when almost no one cared about Ordinals inscriptions.

Investment research firm ByteTree upgraded bitcoin’s price outlook to “bull” from “neutral” as the crypto benefits as a “safe haven” amid an equity and bond sell-off.

Stellar joined the industry group developing Wasm, an alternative computation engine for running smart contracts.

Solv, the investment platform that allows investors to gain exposure to onchain funds, has completed a new funding round of its own. Originally backed by Binance Labs and Blockchain Capital, Solv’s latest round attracted participation from a host of leading names including Laser Digital, a subsidiary of Japanese banking titan Nomura Securities. UOB Venture Management, Mirana Ventures, Emirates Consortium, Matrix Partners, Apollo Capital, HashCIB, Geek Cartel, Bing Ventures, and Bytetrade Labs all participated in the latest round, which arrives off the back of Solv V3 successfully launching. The latest version of the investment platform went live in Q2 of this year and has already recorded more than $100 million in trading volume from over 25,000 users. Investors Invest in the Investor Solv is in the business of democratizing access to crypto investments, giving regular users exposure to funds that have been tailored to suit their risk profile and expectations. The platform brings professional asset management to an on-chain environment with the corresponding transparency to show that funds are being utilized for their stated purpose. The V3 launch of Solv has gone smoothly so far, with investors finding favor with the improved interface and enhanced options for accessing a variety of funds. Investors are presented with a range of choices to suit their preferred strategy starting with the estimated APR and fund term. There’s also information on the maturity date, fund size, and status e.g whether it is currently active or closed. Commenting on the sort of investment opportunities that V3 will be focused on, moving forwards, Solv CEO Ryan Chow said: “New DeFi narratives, such as RWA and LSD, are driving speculation around the next iteration of DeFi summer. Solv V3 will focus on the RWA track, and is committed to introducing billions of dollars worth of income-generating assets for the industry through our fund platform, in preparation for the next phase of DeFi mass adoption.” Real world assets and liquid staking derivatives are two of the largest verticals currently taking shape under DeFi’s broad umbrella. The former entails making stocks, commodities, and real estate as well as forex markets tradable on-chain, complete with the benefits this bestows in terms of information symmetry, 24/7 access, and greater transparency. LSDfi, meanwhile, in which staking derivatives are repurposed elsewhere for yield generation and to secure L2 chains, is fueling much of the DeFi innovation taking place at present. The Convergence of TradFi and DeFi Olivier Dang, General Partner of Ventures at the Nomura subsidiary Laser Digital, who participated in Solv’s latest round, explains: “Solv has built a trustless DeFi platform with a trusted institutional network, integrating brokers, underwriters, market makers, and custodians to create the first fund infrastructure on the blockchain, becoming an important infrastructure that bridges DeFi, CeFi, and TradFi liquidity.” This ability to unite TradFi and DeFi accounts for why Solv Protocol appears to have had no trouble in filling its funding round. Investors are aware of the upside to startups that can bring legacy money to “the future of finance” by convincing institutions that on-chain is where the real yield lies. Companies creating the picks and shovels required to facilitate this – decentralized identities; institutional-grade wallets; better onramps – will play a key role in bringing this vision into reality. And the projects that invest in them in turn, through funds such as Solv, have the potential to capture a slice of the pie. Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Researchers at Meta AI may have developed a way to get around the “tokenization” problem with GPT models.

Whampoa Group started its digital asset arm in 2021 and has invested in a $500 million Binance Labs fund along with TikTok parent ByteDance.

So far in this series, we've already talked about what Bitcoin is, about how you can buy it, and how you can spend it, but how is it actually made? Bitcoin vs. Gold The short answer is that new Bitcoins are mined. However, since that is just giving a label, rather than a definition, you’re probably going to want to know a bit more than that. It’s perhaps easiest to compare Bitcoin to its nearest physical equivalent: gold. Just as existent banking systems are (or at least were) based on the quantity and value of gold in a given country’s banks, the security and validity of Bitcoin based on the quantity of Bitcoins currently available in the network. Likewise, the production of new amounts of both gold and Bitcoin meet the same paradox. As mining equipment becomes more and more powerful, so the amount of material to be mined becomes less and less, meaning that more effort is being pumped in to get the same net returns. However, this leads to a predictable and sustainable growth of the amount of either resource in the real world. Of course, in the case of gold, this is just how it worked out. Gold is an element, and therefore cannot be produced or created out of something else, no matter what any budding alchemist might tell you. Recent estimates hold the total amount of mined gold in the world to be somewhere in the region of 187,000 tonnes, with a further 3,000 to 4,000 tonnes being produced as a result of mining every year. As it becomes ever more scarce, new mining techniques and equipment must be discovered and invented in order to maintain that level of production. Bitcoin follows the same pattern, and deliberately so. Being a cryptocurrency, creating new Bitcoins could have been as easy as pressing the hash key on your laptop, but that would have been pointless: a free, abundant, and infinite supply of any commodity leads to devaluation and hyperinflation, and your billions and billions of Bitcoins would be worth less than the laptop that allowed you to make them. As with gold, scarcity and reliability are the cornerstones of Bitcoin. In a white paper that he published in 2008, Bitcoin’s creator Satoshi Nakamoto stated that the availability of Bitcoins would be capped at 21 million. By best estimates, almost 17 million of those Bitcoins have been created (or mined) as of 2017. But what of the mining itself? We can picture the notion of mining for gold – massive drills and diggers clawing out a mountainside to release the gold ore within, and so on – but what are we actually mining for when it comes to a pseudo-currency? To understand that, we need to talk about transactions, blocks, and blockchains. Transactions A transaction is any activity involving Bitcoins. If you buy a Bitcoin from a vendor, then that is a transaction. If you sell a Bitcoin to a buyer, then that is a transaction. If you purchase goods or services with a Bitcoin, then that is also a transaction. Think of each of them as being a line in a physical ledger, denoting money in and money out. Blocks If a transaction is a line in a ledger book, then a block is a page in the same book, essentially a collection of transactions. In real terms, a block is 1 megabyte (Mb) worth of transactions on the Bitcoin network. As each block (or page) is completed, the next transaction to be undertaken will fall into the next available block. A block is a permanent record of transactions on the Bitcoin network, and one that cannot be erased, removed or amended. Blockchain Again, if a transaction is a line in the ledger and if a block is a page in a ledger, then the blockchain is the ledger itself. Every ‘page’ filled in is a new block, or a new link on the chain. This blockchain stretches all the way back to the beginning of the Bitcoin revolution and the Genesis block that Satoshi Nakamoto released in 2008. If you purchase a Bitcoin from a vendor, then it is entirely possible, given enough time and patience, to trace the life of that Bitcoin all the way back along the blockchain, working your way through blocks (or pages, to return to our ledger analogy), all the way to the point where your Bitcoin was first created, or mined. Which leads us back to our original question: how is a Bitcoin made, and what is Bitcoin mining? Mining First of all, it’s important to realise that mining is just a piece of Bitcoin terminology. What Bitcoin miners are actually doing is auditing and verifying transactions on the network, specifically preventing a thing called double-spending, whereby someone could create an electronic copy of a Bitcoin, and spend it twice. Because every single Bitcoin transaction is held somewhere along the blockchain, the blockchain itself becomes the verification of legitimacy. If a transaction has made it into a block, and that block has made it on to the chain, then the sale or purchase in question was, by definition, a legitimate one. So, in order to maintain that legitimacy, every single transaction must be checked, in detail and in depth, to confirm the provenance of the bitcoins being used in the transaction, which is where the miners come in. The miners perform two tasks – the first is for the good of the network, and it is the verification of Bitcoin transactions. Once they have verified enough transactions to fill up a block (that is, 1Mb of transactions, you’ll remember, which could potentially equate to hundreds or even thousands of lines in our virtual ledger), they will be eligible to win a crop of newly-generated bitcoins. This, then, is the second task. The Bitcoins are generated by the networks own protocols, and are essentially up for grabs. At the moment, each new block allows the miner the opportunity to go for those bitcoins (currently 12.5 bitcoins are being generated, or mined, for each new block), and this is where the competition steps up. You see, verifying a block’s worth of transactions is pretty easy stuff. The next stage, to win the bitcoins themselves, only happens if you’re the first miner who happens to arrive at the correct answer to a specific numerical problem. In the Bitcoin network, this principle is referred to as proof of work. Proof of work You’ll be glad to know that there is no need to have experience with advanced computation skills or mathematics in order to provide your proof of work, as it is all done by your mining software. What that software is attempting to do is to generate what is known as a hash. A hash is a hexadecimal number that is 64-digits long, with each digit being one of sixteen designations (hence the word hexadecimal, from the Greek hexa meaning six, and “deca”, meaning ten: six plus ten). For Bitcoin purposes, the sixteen possible designations are 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 0, a, b , c, d, e, and f. Now, the Bitcoin network produces a target hash, completely at random, with no formula for calculation, and no way of predicting it based on previous hashes – rather like a National Lottery Draw, for instance. Every hash is unique, and prior hashes have no bearing on the future. When a miner manages to complete a box of transaction audits, then they are allowed to have a guess at the value of the target hash, by producing their own hash. If the miner’s hash is equal to or lower than the target hash, and that miner is the first one to do so, then 12.5 Bitcoins will be generated (or minted if you want to think in terms of regular currency) and added to the existing pool of Bitcoins available for all. More specifically, those 12.5 Bitcoins are awarded to the miner who guessed the hash correctly. Now, if that all sounds a bit too easy, it almost certainly is. The odds of a lone miner making any serious cash out of mining for Bitcoins are stratospheric. Indeed, the odds of anyone hash producing a result that is under the target hash is less than 1 in a trillion. What allows Bitcoins to continue to be generated, and at such a rate (the average clearance time for a block is 10 minutes, with 12.5 Bitcoins being generated each time to account for same) is that there are loads of Bitcoin miners out there, using very sophisticated equipment and, perhaps more importantly, thousands of linked computers to do the computational work for them. There is dedicated mining hardware and software out there, capable of producing billions of hashes per second, spread over thousands of computers and, even then, there is no guarantee of success. Your newly-generated hash, even if it does meet the criteria, simply might not get there in time. Some other miner, or mining syndicate might have snagged that same hash mere seconds before you but, in the world of Bitcoin mining, the winners get the spoils. Lottery As mentioned above, the odds of a single user just happening to come across the right hexadecimal code in time to cash in are pretty unlikely and yet, with all those Bitcoins being spawned at the rate of 75 bitcoins per hour, and up for grabs, someone has to win it, and it could be a solo user. Think of bitcoin mining as a lottery because, quite literally, that’s what it is. While Bitcoin as a currency is one of the strongest and the most stable, getting your hands on those newly-minted bitcoins is going to take more than a little luck. First, there is your work for the network – that is, your verification of previous transactions, or lines in the ledger, to return to a previous analogy. 1Mb of transactions means that you’ve filled a block and that is essentially your lottery ticket, your eligibility to partake in a spot of hashing. Each hash attempt is a line of numbers on your ticket, and each line has a chance of winning the jackpot, so long as the numbers fit into a certain hexadecimal pattern. The good news is that you can submit your hashes as many times as you like, thousands and millions, and billions of times per second, which sounds great, except you probably still won’t hit the magic number, as every single newly generated hash retains the same odds of over a trillion to one. Again, just like the lottery, many people think of joining a syndicate. The rationale here is the same. One person, even one person with a decent mining set-up stands an infinitesimal chance of matching a hash. Two people combining hashes stand a slightly better chance, a couple of dozen even better, and a few thousand? Well, you get the idea. More people combining their blocks results in more hash attempts made over a given period of time, and a greater chance of getting the desired result. Of course, whenever you do win, you’ll make less, having to share your Bitcoins, or the value thereof with all of your fellow syndicate makers. You may also owe an additional fee to the syndicate organiser, who will normally take a percentage or two of any earnings, on the grounds that he is ensuring the legality of the exchange, and corralling all of the mining efforts of any given syndicate. However, it is a path worth pursuing. With Bitcoin currently valued at around $5,000 per bitcoin, and 12.5 of them available (or $62,500) every 10 minutes a sufficiently large and well-equipped mining syndicate can see decent profits as more people jump on board, prompting more transactions, blocks filled up quicker, and a swifter generation of more Bitcoins into the cybereconomy.

So far in this series, we've already talked about what Bitcoin is, about how you can buy it, and how you can spend it, but how is it actually made? Bitcoin vs. Gold The short answer is that new Bitcoins are mined. However, since that is just giving a label, rather than a definition, you’re probably going to want to know a bit more than that. It’s perhaps easiest to compare Bitcoin to its nearest physical equivalent: gold. Just as existent banking systems are (or at least were) based on the quantity and value of gold in a given country’s banks, the security and validity of Bitcoin based on the quantity of Bitcoins currently available in the network. Likewise, the production of new amounts of both gold and Bitcoin meet the same paradox. As mining equipment becomes more and more powerful, so the amount of material to be mined becomes less and less, meaning that more effort is being pumped in to get the same net returns. However, this leads to a predictable and sustainable growth of the amount of either resource in the real world. Of course, in the case of gold, this is just how it worked out. Gold is an element, and therefore cannot be produced or created out of something else, no matter what any budding alchemist might tell you. Recent estimates hold the total amount of mined gold in the world to be somewhere in the region of 187,000 tonnes, with a further 3,000 to 4,000 tonnes being produced as a result of mining every year. As it becomes ever more scarce, new mining techniques and equipment must be discovered and invented in order to maintain that level of production. Bitcoin follows the same pattern, and deliberately so. Being a cryptocurrency, creating new Bitcoins could have been as easy as pressing the hash key on your laptop, but that would have been pointless: a free, abundant, and infinite supply of any commodity leads to devaluation and hyperinflation, and your billions and billions of Bitcoins would be worth less than the laptop that allowed you to make them. As with gold, scarcity and reliability are the cornerstones of Bitcoin. In a white paper that he published in 2008, Bitcoin’s creator Satoshi Nakamoto stated that the availability of Bitcoins would be capped at 21 million. By best estimates, almost 17 million of those Bitcoins have been created (or mined) as of 2017. But what of the mining itself? We can picture the notion of mining for gold – massive drills and diggers clawing out a mountainside to release the gold ore within, and so on – but what are we actually mining for when it comes to a pseudo-currency? To understand that, we need to talk about transactions, blocks, and blockchains. Transactions A transaction is any activity involving Bitcoins. If you buy a Bitcoin from a vendor, then that is a transaction. If you sell a Bitcoin to a buyer, then that is a transaction. If you purchase goods or services with a Bitcoin, then that is also a transaction. Think of each of them as being a line in a physical ledger, denoting money in and money out. Blocks If a transaction is a line in a ledger book, then a block is a page in the same book, essentially a collection of transactions. In real terms, a block is 1 megabyte (Mb) worth of transactions on the Bitcoin network. As each block (or page) is completed, the next transaction to be undertaken will fall into the next available block. A block is a permanent record of transactions on the Bitcoin network, and one that cannot be erased, removed or amended. Blockchain Again, if a transaction is a line in the ledger and if a block is a page in a ledger, then the blockchain is the ledger itself. Every ‘page’ filled in is a new block, or a new link on the chain. This blockchain stretches all the way back to the beginning of the Bitcoin revolution and the Genesis block that Satoshi Nakamoto released in 2008. If you purchase a Bitcoin from a vendor, then it is entirely possible, given enough time and patience, to trace the life of that Bitcoin all the way back along the blockchain, working your way through blocks (or pages, to return to our ledger analogy), all the way to the point where your Bitcoin was first created, or mined. Which leads us back to our original question: how is a Bitcoin made, and what is Bitcoin mining? Mining First of all, it’s important to realise that mining is just a piece of Bitcoin terminology. What Bitcoin miners are actually doing is auditing and verifying transactions on the network, specifically preventing a thing called double-spending, whereby someone could create an electronic copy of a Bitcoin, and spend it twice. Because every single Bitcoin transaction is held somewhere along the blockchain, the blockchain itself becomes the verification of legitimacy. If a transaction has made it into a block, and that block has made it on to the chain, then the sale or purchase in question was, by definition, a legitimate one. So, in order to maintain that legitimacy, every single transaction must be checked, in detail and in depth, to confirm the provenance of the bitcoins being used in the transaction, which is where the miners come in. The miners perform two tasks – the first is for the good of the network, and it is the verification of Bitcoin transactions. Once they have verified enough transactions to fill up a block (that is, 1Mb of transactions, you’ll remember, which could potentially equate to hundreds or even thousands of lines in our virtual ledger), they will be eligible to win a crop of newly-generated bitcoins. This, then, is the second task. The Bitcoins are generated by the networks own protocols, and are essentially up for grabs. At the moment, each new block allows the miner the opportunity to go for those bitcoins (currently 12.5 bitcoins are being generated, or mined, for each new block), and this is where the competition steps up. You see, verifying a block’s worth of transactions is pretty easy stuff. The next stage, to win the bitcoins themselves, only happens if you’re the first miner who happens to arrive at the correct answer to a specific numerical problem. In the Bitcoin network, this principle is referred to as proof of work. Proof of work You’ll be glad to know that there is no need to have experience with advanced computation skills or mathematics in order to provide your proof of work, as it is all done by your mining software. What that software is attempting to do is to generate what is known as a hash. A hash is a hexadecimal number that is 64-digits long, with each digit being one of sixteen designations (hence the word hexadecimal, from the Greek hexa meaning six, and “deca”, meaning ten: six plus ten). For Bitcoin purposes, the sixteen possible designations are 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 0, a, b , c, d, e, and f. Now, the Bitcoin network produces a target hash, completely at random, with no formula for calculation, and no way of predicting it based on previous hashes – rather like a National Lottery Draw, for instance. Every hash is unique, and prior hashes have no bearing on the future. When a miner manages to complete a box of transaction audits, then they are allowed to have a guess at the value of the target hash, by producing their own hash. If the miner’s hash is equal to or lower than the target hash, and that miner is the first one to do so, then 12.5 Bitcoins will be generated (or minted if you want to think in terms of regular currency) and added to the existing pool of Bitcoins available for all. More specifically, those 12.5 Bitcoins are awarded to the miner who guessed the hash correctly. Now, if that all sounds a bit too easy, it almost certainly is. The odds of a lone miner making any serious cash out of mining for Bitcoins are stratospheric. Indeed, the odds of anyone hash producing a result that is under the target hash is less than 1 in a trillion. What allows Bitcoins to continue to be generated, and at such a rate (the average clearance time for a block is 10 minutes, with 12.5 Bitcoins being generated each time to account for same) is that there are loads of Bitcoin miners out there, using very sophisticated equipment and, perhaps more importantly, thousands of linked computers to do the computational work for them. There is dedicated mining hardware and software out there, capable of producing billions of hashes per second, spread over thousands of computers and, even then, there is no guarantee of success. Your newly-generated hash, even if it does meet the criteria, simply might not get there in time. Some other miner, or mining syndicate might have snagged that same hash mere seconds before you but, in the world of Bitcoin mining, the winners get the spoils. Lottery As mentioned above, the odds of a single user just happening to come across the right hexadecimal code in time to cash in are pretty unlikely and yet, with all those Bitcoins being spawned at the rate of 75 bitcoins per hour, and up for grabs, someone has to win it, and it could be a solo user. Think of bitcoin mining as a lottery because, quite literally, that’s what it is. While Bitcoin as a currency is one of the strongest and the most stable, getting your hands on those newly-minted bitcoins is going to take more than a little luck. First, there is your work for the network – that is, your verification of previous transactions, or lines in the ledger, to return to a previous analogy. 1Mb of transactions means that you’ve filled a block and that is essentially your lottery ticket, your eligibility to partake in a spot of hashing. Each hash attempt is a line of numbers on your ticket, and each line has a chance of winning the jackpot, so long as the numbers fit into a certain hexadecimal pattern. The good news is that you can submit your hashes as many times as you like, thousands and millions, and billions of times per second, which sounds great, except you probably still won’t hit the magic number, as every single newly generated hash retains the same odds of over a trillion to one. Again, just like the lottery, many people think of joining a syndicate. The rationale here is the same. One person, even one person with a decent mining set-up stands an infinitesimal chance of matching a hash. Two people combining hashes stand a slightly better chance, a couple of dozen even better, and a few thousand? Well, you get the idea. More people combining their blocks results in more hash attempts made over a given period of time, and a greater chance of getting the desired result. Of course, whenever you do win, you’ll make less, having to share your Bitcoins, or the value thereof with all of your fellow syndicate makers. You may also owe an additional fee to the syndicate organiser, who will normally take a percentage or two of any earnings, on the grounds that he is ensuring the legality of the exchange, and corralling all of the mining efforts of any given syndicate. However, it is a path worth pursuing. With Bitcoin currently valued at around $5,000 per bitcoin, and 12.5 of them available (or $62,500) every 10 minutes a sufficiently large and well-equipped mining syndicate can see decent profits as more people jump on board, prompting more transactions, blocks filled up quicker, and a swifter generation of more Bitcoins into the cybereconomy.

We all know that mining is not cheap so we need to take advantage of the many great deals available on Black Friday weekend. We have searched the web and found the latest deals. There is a mixture of UK and US deals to look through. Feel free to comment anything else that has caught your eye. If you like Destiny 2 you are on for an added treat. This ZOTAC GTX 1070 Mini is the cheapest GTX 1070 available right now. Newegg as it on offer at $419. It has been seen below $400, but today this is the best price. This is the best UK price we have seen. Zotac NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Mini 8GB Graphics Card £372.99 at ebuyer This is on at just $499 the GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1080 DirectX 12 GV-N1080WF3OC-8GD Video Card and the lowest price we have seen on GTX 1080 and a free copy of Destiny 2 to tempt you further. EVGA Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11GB SC Black Edition iCX Cooling – £650 from Scan is another favourite GTX 1080 TI deal, With this particular deal, you can also claim a free EVGA Powerlink or FX Series Fan. Was £729 Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1070Ti GAMING 8GB – $470 from Newegg Faster than the GTX 1070, this Gigabyte GTX 1070Ti is being discounted until Monday. You also get a free copy of 3DMark’s Advanced Edition benchmarking tool with this card. Again, with a free copy of Destiny 2 Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 WindForce: £490 from Amazon.co.uk The GTX 1080 has for a limited time they’re all being sold with a free copy of Destiny 2 on PC. This Gigabyte model comes with a superb little overclock for improved performance. Zotac GTX 1080 Ti AMP: £675 from Ebuyer This GTX 1080 Ti is a beast of a graphics card, handling 4K, no problem. It comes with a free copy of Destiny 2. This is a great deal for Black Friday from Ebuyer. This is one of the lowest prices we’ve ever seen for the GTX 1080 Ti. So here are just a few of the great deals going on at the moment, if you can call spending 500 notes on a graphic card a deal.

We all know that mining is not cheap so we need to take advantage of the many great deals available on Black Friday weekend. We have searched the web and found the latest deals. There is a mixture of UK and US deals to look through. Feel free to comment anything else that has caught your eye. If you like Destiny 2 you are on for an added treat. This ZOTAC GTX 1070 Mini is the cheapest GTX 1070 available right now. Newegg as it on offer at $419. It has been seen below $400, but today this is the best price. This is the best UK price we have seen. Zotac NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Mini 8GB Graphics Card £372.99 at ebuyer This is on at just $499 the GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1080 DirectX 12 GV-N1080WF3OC-8GD Video Card and the lowest price we have seen on GTX 1080 and a free copy of Destiny 2 to tempt you further. EVGA Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11GB SC Black Edition iCX Cooling – £650 from Scan is another favourite GTX 1080 TI deal, With this particular deal, you can also claim a free EVGA Powerlink or FX Series Fan. Was £729 Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1070Ti GAMING 8GB – $470 from Newegg Faster than the GTX 1070, this Gigabyte GTX 1070Ti is being discounted until Monday. You also get a free copy of 3DMark’s Advanced Edition benchmarking tool with this card. Again, with a free copy of Destiny 2 Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 WindForce: £490 from Amazon.co.uk The GTX 1080 has for a limited time they’re all being sold with a free copy of Destiny 2 on PC. This Gigabyte model comes with a superb little overclock for improved performance. Zotac GTX 1080 Ti AMP: £675 from Ebuyer This GTX 1080 Ti is a beast of a graphics card, handling 4K, no problem. It comes with a free copy of Destiny 2. This is a great deal for Black Friday from Ebuyer. This is one of the lowest prices we’ve ever seen for the GTX 1080 Ti. So here are just a few of the great deals going on at the moment, if you can call spending 500 notes on a graphic card a deal.

The whole of the cryptocurrency world is currently fussing over recent events regarding Bitcoin, and rightly so. The price drop of $1,000 per BTC and the pulled release of the planned SegWit2x hardfork has kept Bitcoin firmly in the public eye. In the meantime however, Ethereum has been making slow and steady improvements and growing its own network. Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency, has seen an increase in usage recently as the ICO world grows and the new ERC20 and ERC223 tokens were born. The Ethereum Foundation recently published a report that indicated the network had processed around 44% more transactions than Bitcoin; a statistic showing the true potential of Ethereum’s intuitive system. In the same period, the number of pending transactions for Bitcoin has fluctuated from 39,000 to 47,000, while the number for Ethereum has been stable - between 30 and 300. Ethereum released the ZK-SNARK protocol alongside their Byzantium hardfork and this move was criticized by some insiders because of the risk from attack it is believed to be open to from quantum computers. It had been thought that the fork would cause a sudden boom in adoption from Wall Street, however it is now believed that the risk from quantum computers has kept it steady. Ethereum’s founder Vitalik Buterin has released a paper recently that indicates a conceptualised ZK-STARK protocol designed to protect a full zero-knowledge transaction from attack from anything; even from a quantum computer. This new protocol relies solely on hashes and information theory, rather than the ‘trusted setup’ that ZK-SNARK relies upon. According to Buterin, while this upgraded anonymity is necessary, it does come at a data cost; from 288 bytes to a few hundred kilobytes. However, in applications where the extra protection is critical, the additional data usage would provide something unique to Ethereum: truly secure and anonymous transaction processing.

The whole of the cryptocurrency world is currently fussing over recent events regarding Bitcoin, and rightly so. The price drop of $1,000 per BTC and the pulled release of the planned SegWit2x hardfork has kept Bitcoin firmly in the public eye. In the meantime however, Ethereum has been making slow and steady improvements and growing its own network. Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency, has seen an increase in usage recently as the ICO world grows and the new ERC20 and ERC223 tokens were born. The Ethereum Foundation recently published a report that indicated the network had processed around 44% more transactions than Bitcoin; a statistic showing the true potential of Ethereum’s intuitive system. In the same period, the number of pending transactions for Bitcoin has fluctuated from 39,000 to 47,000, while the number for Ethereum has been stable - between 30 and 300. Ethereum released the ZK-SNARK protocol alongside their Byzantium hardfork and this move was criticized by some insiders because of the risk from attack it is believed to be open to from quantum computers. It had been thought that the fork would cause a sudden boom in adoption from Wall Street, however it is now believed that the risk from quantum computers has kept it steady. Ethereum’s founder Vitalik Buterin has released a paper recently that indicates a conceptualised ZK-STARK protocol designed to protect a full zero-knowledge transaction from attack from anything; even from a quantum computer. This new protocol relies solely on hashes and information theory, rather than the ‘trusted setup’ that ZK-SNARK relies upon. According to Buterin, while this upgraded anonymity is necessary, it does come at a data cost; from 288 bytes to a few hundred kilobytes. However, in applications where the extra protection is critical, the additional data usage would provide something unique to Ethereum: truly secure and anonymous transaction processing.

The gyrations of Bitcoin's price are becoming extreme. After leaping to $7,354 earlier in the week before falling back to $6,700, it then boomeranged again to $7,900 on 8th November before again dropping precipitously by $800. Today it stands at a relatively becalmed $6,878. Swings like this of up to 10% make even the bravest rider of the roller-coaster queasy, and could be a sign that volatility is about to break downwards in a big way. On the other hand, stock-markets worldwide are dreading a 10% correction that Bitcoin now takes in its stride. With the price of the cryptocurrency apparently testing and bouncing off the upper limit, it might actually be a case of profit-taking, buying the dip and bidding back up the price - a very nice living while it lasts. And while liquidity is certainly not a problem in Bitcoinland, it’s the nightmare of super-inflated equities markets. The recent suspension of the so-called “Hard Fork” 2-megabyte upgrade has only added to the yoyoing price. Bitcoin is a community that relies on consensus, especially from its early and senior members, and that’s increasingly lacking as the stakes (in every sense) grow larger. Hence the abandonment of the fork, designed to speed up transaction times but perhaps feared as a security issue or even a quasi-devaluation by some. But it led directly to a new high price based purely on sentiment, rather than analysis of long-term prospects. The blockchain’s best applications and value will always lie in the ways it can eliminate the middleman - but without a hard fork, Bitcoin itself is turning into the middleman. Its success is the problem with the current 1MB size, because as the Bitcoin user base doubles annually, transactions must fight to get into a block, resulting in delays and higher fees, which have risen to $1 from 5 cents over the past 12 months, hurting micro-transactions. In the meantime, workarounds such as Litecoin may prove lucrative.

The gyrations of Bitcoin's price are becoming extreme. After leaping to $7,354 earlier in the week before falling back to $6,700, it then boomeranged again to $7,900 on 8th November before again dropping precipitously by $800. Today it stands at a relatively becalmed $6,878. Swings like this of up to 10% make even the bravest rider of the roller-coaster queasy, and could be a sign that volatility is about to break downwards in a big way. On the other hand, stock-markets worldwide are dreading a 10% correction that Bitcoin now takes in its stride. With the price of the cryptocurrency apparently testing and bouncing off the upper limit, it might actually be a case of profit-taking, buying the dip and bidding back up the price - a very nice living while it lasts. And while liquidity is certainly not a problem in Bitcoinland, it’s the nightmare of super-inflated equities markets. The recent suspension of the so-called “Hard Fork” 2-megabyte upgrade has only added to the yoyoing price. Bitcoin is a community that relies on consensus, especially from its early and senior members, and that’s increasingly lacking as the stakes (in every sense) grow larger. Hence the abandonment of the fork, designed to speed up transaction times but perhaps feared as a security issue or even a quasi-devaluation by some. But it led directly to a new high price based purely on sentiment, rather than analysis of long-term prospects. The blockchain’s best applications and value will always lie in the ways it can eliminate the middleman - but without a hard fork, Bitcoin itself is turning into the middleman. Its success is the problem with the current 1MB size, because as the Bitcoin user base doubles annually, transactions must fight to get into a block, resulting in delays and higher fees, which have risen to $1 from 5 cents over the past 12 months, hurting micro-transactions. In the meantime, workarounds such as Litecoin may prove lucrative.