CoinTerra to Release GSX I Water-Cooled PCIe Bitcoin Mining Card

Daniel Cawrey (@danielcawrey) | Published on February 18, 2014 at 01:21 GMT | Cointerra, Mining, News

Austin, Texas-based CoinTerra has announced its second product.
Called the GSX I, the card form factor bitcoin miner uses water for cooling, and notably, has a radiator serving as a heat exchange for the water, piping it over the board. The GSX I is a 400 GH/s unit that has a 28nm chip.
Jim O’Connor, vice president of engineering for CoinTerra, spoke to CoinDesk about the upcoming launch, and said he believes using water is the best method of cooling for a card.
Said O’Connor:

“With the PCIe form factor and space constraints of a PC case, there simply is no other solution that is able to dissipate heat effectively enough.
Mounting any form of air cooling head on the ASIC would make it impossible to fit the card in any standard motherboard and not take up more than two PCIe slots”

Product testing

O’Conner believes that the card will allow for increased mining flexibility.
“The GSX I is designed to facilitate daisy chaining via USB using a PC host, but we will ultimately leave it up to the community to experiment with their own flavors of controller,” he said.
CoinTerra stated that, through testing, it has found that a single BeagleBoard host could control at least 20 cards.
“Our simulations show that a single BeagleBone Black should be able to provide work to a large number of GSX I cards,” said O’Connor.
A BeagleBone Black is a $45 device powered by a 1 GHz ARM Cortex-A8.

Side view rendering of the GSX I. Source: CoinTerra

Increased competition

CoinTerra isn’t the only mining company developing water-cooled PCI cards.
Kansas City-based Butterfly Labs also has a similar product on the way. Called the Monarch, that unit is a 600 GH/s 350 watt card for $2,196. By comparison, the GSX I consumes 400 watts of power and costs $1,599.
The Monarch is expected to start shipping this month. It will be available in air or water-cooled configurations.
Josh Zerlan, VP of product for Butterfly Labs, recently told CoinDesk that radiator mounting is one challenge for water board cooling.
O’Conner says that CoinTerra’s GSX I will fit within a standardized specification.
“The radiator is designed for easy mounting using standard 120mm fan mounts available in most standard PC cases,” he said.

Launch criticisms

CoinTerra plans to ship the GSX I by June. The company has received some criticism for not shipping its first product, the $5,999 2 TH/s TerraMiner, on time.
In a statement to CoinDesk last week, CoinTerra addressed the situation. The company wrote that units are being delivered, and that it is trying to ramp up operation.

“In addition to our initial production facility, we have brought a second, larger production facility online to increase volume substantially, allowing us to quickly catch up to our communicated delivery dates and meet future batch expectations.”

Preorders for the GSX I are open now. The scheduled date for shipments is June 2014.

Bitcoin Wins Best Technology Achievement at TechCrunch Awards

Nermin Hajdarbegovic | Published on February 11, 2014 at 13:08 GMT | Companies, Events, News, Technology

Bitcoin has won the TechCrunch Best Technology Achievement award at the 2013 Crunchies.
The 7th annual award ceremony was held last night in San Francisco and it was put together by TechCrunch, Gigaom and VentureBeat.
The fact that TechCrunch readers voted for bitcoin probably caused a problem or two for the organisers. Satoshi Nakamoto was a no-show, so Peter Vessenes, Chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation, accepted the prize in his place.
The award was presented by Gigaom’s Tom Krazit and Khosla Venture’s Keith Rabois. Here’s how TechCrunch explained the conundrum:

“Since no one person made bitcoin (or did they?) the award goes to the idea and the hard-working men and women around the world who are maintaining, mining, and improving the BTC protocol. It’s also an exciting time for economists who have suddenly become useful again as they try to explain the vagaries of currency pricing.”

TechCrunch went on to conclude that bitcoin is “almost mainstream” and that it seems like it is here to stay.
Although winning a Crunchie is no small feat, the last few weeks have been marred by bad news for cryptocurrencies. First there was Charlie Shrem, then a few regulatory problems and bans, and then came the Mt. Gox freeze.
However, there were some positive developments that can’t be overlooked. Microsoft’s Bing search engine added a bitcoin converter just the other day.
Several big merchants have gotten on board over the past few weeks and the New York bitcoin hearings ended on a high note, although they were overshadowed by the Shrem affair.

Increased coverage

The sheer amount of coverage has increased, too. Bitcoin is no longer reserved for specialised publications and tech sites, as mainstream media sites show increasing interest in the fledgling currency.
Financial institutions are looking into bitcoin too, and some have already issued relatively positive reports on the currency and the future of digital currencies in general.
Bitcoin still has its ups and downs, but it is easy to argue the biggest positive development on the public relations front does not have anything to do actual news.
The fact that the media focus is no longer on price and speculation means that interest is now shifting to more serious issues like real world applications of digital currencies and regulatory issues.
In other words, attention seems to be shifting toward the areas that are integral to the growth of the bitcoin economy as a whole.
Image Credit: TechCrunch

Fiverr becomes another notch on Bitcoin's belt

The online marketplace has started accepting the digital currency, joining the likes of Fancy.com, OKCupid and Overstock.

By Matthew Flamm

February 11, 2014 6:00 a.m.

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Tel Aviv-based Fiverr has begun accepting Bitcoin. Photo: Fiverr.com

Fiverr, a global online marketplace for people who offer low-cost services, has begun accepting payment in the digital currency known as Bitcoin.
The company, which is based in Tel Aviv but has its marketing and sales headquarters in New York, announced Tuesday that it has partnered with Bitcoin payments company Coinbase, which will handle the purely digital transactions.
Services for sale on Fiverr range from article-writing to voiceovers and logo designs, with each one starting at $5. The move by the company—which joins Fancy.com, OKCupid and Overstock among online businesses that accept Bitcoin—marks one more advance for the still obscure, stateless currency whose advocates claim it represents the future of money.
Practical advantages of using Bitcoin include no transaction fees if the seller keeps the payment in Bitcoin. There is a 1% charge to convert to local currency, but the fee is waived on the first $1 million in merchant processing, a Fiverr spokeswoman said.
Though Fiverr might not see much Bitcoin traffic for a while, the company said that adding it as an option was easy and cheap, and that some users will find it more convenient than conventional payment methods such as credit cards and PayPal.
"We serve customers from 196 countries," said Fiverr co-founder and CEO Micha Kaufman in an interview. "Bitcoin is a global currency, and that's not the case with other kinds of payment."
Bitcoins consist of blocks of code that are held in a digital wallet on a computer or mobile device. The coins are "mined" by computer programs that can decipher complex mathematical puzzles, and traded on exchanges.
The currency may be global, but it is also highly controversial—and volatile. Technical troubles at a Japanese Bitcoin exchange last week drove down the price of a single coin to less than $600 from more than $800, before it recovered to a value north of $650 Monday evening.