Tag: Ethereum

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Zcash Vs Monero

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Private coins are a fascinating technology because they allow people to transact without leaving a record. As world-changing as Bitcoin is, one of its big drawbacks is that transactions are publicly recorded where anyone can see them.

The most beneficial feature of the privacy coin is not that you can use it anonymously on the darknet market. No, the best feature of privacy coins is that they are fungible.

Just as any $20 bill is worth any other $20 bill, the privacy coin cannot be “tainted”. Because of their fungibility, a merchant can accept a privacy-protecting coin without caring about where it came from.

As cryptocurrency adoption grows, we expect fungibility to become an increasingly important issue for everyone in the blockchain space. With that in mind, let’s start this article by comparing Zcash vs. Monero, two of the largest private coins on the market.

Zcash Vs Monero
Zcash Vs Monero

Zcash Vs Monero

When it comes to privacy, there is a big difference when comparing Monero vs. Zcash. The difference is that 100% of all Monero (XMR) transactions are anonymous. Monero transactions have always been private and always will be unless something goes terribly wrong.

Zcash (ZEC), on the other hand, gives users the option to send a normal transaction or a shielded transaction (private transaction). Recent statistics show that only about 6% of transactions on the Zcash network are fully protected and 15% partially.

The problem with this model is that since only a small percentage of transactions are private, sending a shadow transaction immediately attracts attention.

For example, imagine you are a regular Zcash user. Send 20 normal transactions in a row and then send the 21st transaction privately.

If someone were to examine your transaction history, the first thing they would ask is; Why did you choose to send this transaction privately? What did you feel the need to hide? This illustrates a fundamental problem with optional private transactions: they stick out.

This low percentage of private transactions also means that Zcash’s set of anonymity or other addresses/transactions that a user and their transactions can “hide” or merge with is small.

On Monero, all transactions are private, so they don’t stand out as much. This means that Monero has more anonymity settings and thus more privacy, as it is more difficult to find out who is on the receiving end of a private transaction.

However, what makes Monero stand out is… The fact that you are using Monero! If law enforcement is interested in your finances, they will likely want you to explain why you feel the need to transact in private cryptocurrency rather than Bitcoin.

In the future, this could harm Monero’s complete privacy from a regulatory perspective. However, it may well be years before regulators take a serious look at it. In the form of cryptocurrency today, your average person may, well, have heard of Bitcoin, but even that is not a given.

Monero and Zcash are so under the radar that they will likely be largely ignored for some time to come. However, this will not last forever. At some point, ZEC and XMR will face disproportionate attention from regulators.

Will they be banned? Heavily regulated? Have you run all major exchanges? But who’s to say that the risk of some government retaliation is negligible and should be taken into account when deciding whether or not to use one of these two coins.

Zcash Mining Vs. Monero

It would be difficult to argue that mining one coin is more profitable than another. After all, the profitability of mining can depend on:

  • Current hardware costs
  • Sale price of the coin
  • Current network hashrate

Probably the only common denominator in mining is the cost of electricity. So the best way to compare profitability is to use a mining calculator. The mining calculator is designed to take into account all current factors affecting profitability and give you an accurate idea of ​​how much you can earn.

Please find the list of authentic Unocoin accounts for all your queries below:

Disclaimer: Crypto products are unregulated as of this date in India. They could be highly volatile. At Unocoin, we understand that there is a need to protect consumer interests as this form of trading and investment has risks that consumers may not be aware of. To ensure that consumers who deal in crypto products are not misled, they are advised to DYOR (Do Your Own Research).

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What is Bitcoin Cash? A complete guide about Bitcoin Cash

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Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is an altcoin version of the popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash is the result of a hard fork in blockchain technology. One of the most significant changes from Bitcoin to Bitcoin Cash is the size of the coin. Previously, Bitcoin’s 1MB limit caused transaction delays, so Bitcoin Cash increased the potential block size to allow more transactions and help scale cryptocurrencies as they grew and competed with more traditional cryptocurrency platforms.

What is Bitcoin Cash? A complete guide about Bitcoin Cash
What is Bitcoin Cash? A complete guide about Bitcoin Cash

After its inception, Bitcoin Cash quickly became the 3rd most successful cryptocurrency, after Bitcoin and Ethereum. Although Bitcoin Cash has a higher transaction speed, the currency is not accepted in as many places as Bitcoin or Ethereum, and disagreements in the developer community have caused Bitcoin Cash to be promoted as an investment tool rather than a transaction currency.

In November 2018, Bitcoin Cash developers decided that another hard fork was necessary, and Bitcoin Cash split into two parts. Forking is often the result of a deadlock in an open-source project that is so insurmountable that all work stops. This usually occurs when development team members are unable to resolve personal conflicts or fail to reach a consensus on the next steps.

In this particular fork, one group of developers felt that the block size should be limited to 32MB. A second group submitted a competing version of the software that increased the block size to 128MB. At the time of writing, the two Bitcoin Cash forks are commonly referred to as Bitcoin ABC (Bitcoin Adjustable Blocksize Cap) and Bitcoin SV (Satoshi’s Vision).

Bitcoin Cash trades on digital currency exchanges including Unocoin, Bitstamp, Coinbase, Bitfinnex, etc

Please find the list of authentic Unocoin accounts for all your queries below:

Disclaimer: Crypto products are unregulated as of this date in India. They could be highly volatile. At Unocoin, we understand that there is a need to protect consumer interests as this form of trading and investment has risks that consumers may not be aware of. To ensure that consumers who deal in crypto products are not misled, they are advised to DYOR (Do Your Own Research).

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Cardano’s Vasil Upgrade

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The long-awaited Vasil hard fork upgrade from Ethereum (ETH) challenger Cardano (ADA) had gone live today, with plans for developers to take advantage of its new capabilities by next week.

Cardano’s Vasil Upgrade

Cardano’s Vasil Upgrade

Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) and its CEO Charles Hoskinson say the mainnet update is ready.

“The [Input Output Global] and [Cardano Foundation] joint team used a hard fork combinator to deploy Vasil at the protocol level on September 22nd. The new features will be available for developers to use on the mainnet exactly one epoch later, on September 27th.”

Hoskinson, who co-created ADA, previously said that the Vasil hard fork represents the next step in the evolution of Cardano and should improve its utility and scalability.

“Moving forward, there will be a big retrospective on how we do things better. There will also be a deep conversation about the overall architecture of Cardano as it is and how we are taking it to the next level to make it more useful, portable, scalable and better for everyone…

It is becoming increasingly clear that the distance between us and everyone else is growing. We built Cardano as the world’s financial operating system. We built it to save banks without a bank account. We built it as a community to give economic identity to those who don’t have it, so we can have one global fair market.

It’s a crazy mission and it seems vast, but when Vasil arrives on September 22, it seems much more attainable.’

The upgrade prompted many leading crypto analysts such as Michaël van de Poppe and Benjamin Cowen to predict a rally for the smart contract platform. Cowen said he expects ADA to reach $0.60, while van de Poppe said a price of $1.00 is not out of the question.

Here are the key dates for your reference:

September 19 – Mainnet update proposal submitted to trigger the HFC 22 event

September 22 (Epoch 365 at 21:45 UTC) – Vasil Mainnet HFC event (Era transitions from Alonzo -> Babbage)

September 27 (Epoch 366 at 21:45 UTC) – Plutus V2 Pricing Model Available on Mainnet

Over 98% of mainnet blocks are now produced by node Vasil (1.35.3). The best Cardano DApps have confirmed that they have been tested and are ready. In the meantime, the top exchanges continue to make good progress in their updates (now over 55% by liquidity), so we are confident that we will be able to proceed with the launch of the hard fork at the appropriate time.

LAUNCHING THE SOLID FORK

Vasil is the most ambitious update program for Cardano to date. With such a complex upgrade with many stakeholders, we need to be sure that the ecosystem is ready and prepared before any hard fork is launched. In order for this mainnet upgrade to go live, the IOG & Cardano Foundation teams will monitor three critical mass indicators that the community will need to achieve:

75% of Mainnet Blocks Produce Final Node Candidate Vasil (1.35.3)

About 25 exchanges upgraded (representing 80% of ad liquidity)

Top 10 DApps from TVL confirming that they have upgraded to 1.35.3 on PreProduction and are ready for mainnet.

Once everyone is cool and ready, the IOG team, working closely with the Cardano Foundation, will launch an upgrade for the Cardano mainnet.

Please find the list of authentic Unocoin accounts for all your queries below:

Disclaimer:Crypto products are unregulated as of this date in India. They could be highly volatile. At Unocoin, we understand that there is a need to protect consumer interests as this form of trading and investment has risks that consumers may not be aware of. To ensure that consumers who deal in crypto products are not misled, they are advised to DYOR (Do Your Own Research).

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Difference Between Bitcoin Vault and Bitcoin Wallet and Exchange Wallet.

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There are three possible ways to store your crypto: wallet, vault and exchange. All three have different use cases and deserve their own place under the sun, but for a new cryptocurrency user, the choices can be overwhelming. Furthermore, there are a lot of things to consider when it comes to the difference between a Bitcoin wallet and a safe.

Difference Between Bitcoin Vault and Bitcoin Wallet and Exchange Wallet.
Difference Between Bitcoin Vault and Bitcoin Wallet and Exchange Wallet.

This article examines the difference between a BTC wallet and a vault, and later focuses on exchanges and their implementations. If you don’t care about the technical details and are simply looking for “cryptocurrency storage 101”, we have a nice infographic on the topic that explains the basic differences without going into the reasons behind them.

What is a bitcoin wallet

To explain exactly what a bitcoin wallet is, we first need to explain what bitcoin is and how it works.

Bitcoin (and any other unit of any cryptocurrency) is a unique digital token. For example “SaMpLe1rPe34nu5hbn3rx6pj4”. These tokens are stored in the Blockchain – a digital ledger that is encrypted and simultaneously updated on all devices connected to it. Each of these devices has a Bitcoin address (public key) that is used to identify it. Some of them have more than one.

A Bitcoin wallet is a unique address on the Blockchain that shows how many tokens (and what kind) that user holds. It is visible to everyone, but in order to access it and transfer bitcoins somewhere else, you need to decrypt them. To do this, you need a private key that only the owner of the bitcoin wallet knows.

And now for the reason why some wallets have more than one address. After using one of the addresses in a transaction, the user must generate a new address and replace the used one. The old one remains usable, but is considered compromised and is not recommended for use. Some wallet users create many addresses in advance to avoid being caught without them.

Advantages of Online Bitcoin Wallets

  • Online wallets are accessible anytime and from any device.
  • Online wallets are easy to use and perfectly suited for everyday bitcoin payments;
  • Online wallets can be recovered if the user has authenticated with the wallet provider.

Disadvantages of Online Bitcoin Wallets

  • Online wallets store bitcoins outside of users’ devices, which poses a security risk;
  • Online wallets require users to trust the wallet provider, which poses a security risk.
  • Online wallets do not provide users with their private keys, which is a security risk and sometimes inconvenient.

Bonpay has its own online wallet where you can create an account in less than a minute. Other popular options are Bitcoin Wallet and Exodus. We also recommend that you learn how to secure cryptocurrency online wallets.

What is a Bitcoin Vault?

The name Bitcoin Vault, pardon the pun, was coined by CoinBase in 2014 as a “safer option for storing bitcoins” compared to their own online bitcoin wallet. Since then, many other companies have started providing both wallets and vaults as separate services. The main differences between a Bitcoin wallet and a vault are:

Advanced account protection. All Trezor payments are delayed for 48 hours, during which the Trezor provider will try to contact the account holder personally. The payment will not take place until the account owner says confirmation. If there are multiple owners (which is possible with group vaults), everyone must approve the transaction.

Geographical distribution. Most bitcoins are not stored on the same server. For example, Coinbase Vault stores 97% of Bitcoins in a geographically distributed network of servers that are not directly connected to the global internet.

Other functions. Some companies provide their Safe users with Premium features. For example, Xapo provides insurance for all Xapo Vault accounts.

However, if you are looking for a significant difference between a Bitcoin wallet and a safe – you may be a little disappointed. At the end of the day Vault is just a Wallet on steroids with some extra paranoid protection systems and some additional services. So when it comes to the BTC Vault vs Wallet battle, the choice is entirely yours.

What is a bitcoin exchange and how does it store bitcoins?

A bitcoin exchange is a place to trade bitcoins for other crypto and fiat currencies. And for the exchange to work, it needs to store each user’s cryptocurrency. Except that giving each user their own separate wallet would seriously cripple the exchange’s performance – as cryptocurrency prices change every second, and a lot can change in the 20 minutes it takes to confirm a trade.

Unocoin is the fastest growing crypto exchange in India

This is why the exchange stores all bitcoins (and other cryptocurrency tokens) in a single wallet. Each user only gets a different address and limited access to only a certain amount that they “own”. I use quotes because these people don’t actually own anything – all tokens legally belong to Coinbase and users only have “access” to them.

This single “fat” wallet is of course an attractive prize for hackers and therefore a massive security risk. Not to mention that in case of hack it will be impossible to get any refund.

If “Bitcoin Vault vs Bitcoin Wallet” is a toss up, “Bitcoin Wallet vs Exchange” isn’t even an option. You should not store your bitcoins (or any other tokens) on exchanges.

But if you need to exchange your BTC for different tokens, you can try Coinbase and Unocoin.

Please find the list of authentic Unocoin accounts for all your queries below:

Disclaimer:Crypto products are unregulated as of this date in India. They could be highly volatile. At Unocoin, we understand that there is a need to protect consumer interests as this form of trading and investment has risks that consumers may not be aware of. To ensure that consumers who deal in crypto products are not misled, they are advised to DYOR (Do Your Own Research).

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A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO CRYPTO MINING 

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During this section, we’ll cover what you should do to get started with cryptocurrency mining. A number of the key areas we will focus on are the best hardware and software and the costs you should be prepared for. 

A BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO CRYPTO MINING 
A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO CRYPTO MINING 

The best hardware for cryptocurrency mining 

As we mentioned before, you would like affordable hardware to mine cryptocurrencies. Different cryptocurrencies use different mining algorithms and this is often also reflected in the mining hardware. 

For Bitcoin and a few select coins, ASIC miners are the simplest because they offer the highest performance and are efficient. However, the most deterrent for new miners looking to start up is cost. 

For example, few can afford the new Bitmain Antminer S19 Pro with 110 TH/s and 3250 W consumption.  This ASIC beast sells for quite $18,000 when it includes the facility supply unit (PSU) and power cables.  this is often too expensive, but it’s the best hardware for mining the Bitcoin SHA-256 algorithm. 

When it involves ASIC-resistant networks, you’ll only mine efficiently with GPU hardware. Nvidia and  AMD graphics cards are the simplest for cryptocurrency mining and are usually used to build mining rigs to get the required range of processing power. 

For example, Nicehash offers a customized 10x NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti mining rig that achieves an honest  600 MH/s with only 1400 W. One RTX 3060 costs around $399 (INR 32,000) 

When you choose a coin to start mining, the primary step is to find out how much it costs to acquire the hardware. 

Other costs to think about  

While hardware is taken into account as the most important part of mining, without enough power you will not achieve anything. Devices that use more power are more profitable, which suggests higher electricity costs and high-end PSUs. 

You also need to consider how much you will pay for electricity, both to run the mining machines and for the flowery cooling system. Note that ASICs can have fans, but you’ll need to install additional fans for better results, even when building a mining rig. 

The best way to mitigate additional costs is to use cheap electricity and use miners with the highest possible efficiency. 

Start mining! 

Once you’ve got the hardware set up, you’re one step away from mining cryptocurrency. The subsequent step is to download compatible mining software. 

If you’re a Windows user, download a software miner supported by Windows, also as Linux and Mac.  You’ll also mine some coins using your Android mobile phone which then requires mobile-supported software.

We also mentioned that you simply may need to join a mining pool. Select one and proceed to configure the mining software, hardware connection to the pool and network you would like to mine. Once you’ve got your wallet set up, your software configured, and your hardware turned on, start mining. 

Mining Solutions/Services 

Mining has become too complicated on some networks, therefore the best alternative for most people is to join mining pools. A mining service or provider allows multiple miners to mix hardware power and mine cryptocurrency as a single unit with a significantly higher hash rate. 

The most important tip when looking to get involved in a mining pool is to make sure you choose one that will guarantee you a reward for your efforts. 

One factor to think about is mining fees. The typical fee should be 1%. It’s important to pay attention to this because you want to save on costs and increase your income. 

Server location is additionally important. By choosing a server that’s closer to you, you increase the prospect of generating more valid blocks. If the servers are located in a country where electricity is cheap, you’ve got the added benefit of reducing costs. 

The mining pool must even be trusted. Established pools are often reliable. If you would like to join a  new pool, thoroughly research what the mining community has got to say about them. 

In addition, you ought to consider a payout scheme. Some are focused on luck, while others even share rewards. Some include high risk but reward their miners handsomely. 

Other factors you ought to consider are the pool’s uptime, minimum payout, and therefore the pool’s overall hashing power. 

There are several mining pools to settle on, with the simplest options depending on the coins you want to mine. During this case, do touch research on the coin in question and see which pools are the best for that cryptocurrency. 

What if you would like to mine cryptocurrency but don’t want to buy the hardware or run it yourself?  

Cloud mining service allows you to rent a hash rate and mine for a given period as agreed within the contract. It removes the responsibility of acquiring and running mining machines, with the additional advantage of being able to mine any coin at a price that suits you. 

However, cloud mining has its weaknesses that you simply should pay close attention to before purchasing contracts. The prevalence of fraud in this industry is alarming. If you do not do your due diligence, you’re likely to fall victim to them. 

Some cloud miners can also take advantage of your naivety and pay you less than you’re worth. Others can terminate your contract as they want. It’s therefore important to read all the clauses in the contract before signing. 

With that in mind, the simplest cloud mining services on the market include Genesis Mining, HashFlare,  NiceHash, and Hashgains. You’ll also research a specific coin to see which cloud mining service is supported.

Please find the list of authentic Unocoin accounts for all your queries below:

Disclaimer:Crypto products are unregulated as of this date in India. They could be highly volatile. At Unocoin, we understand that there is a need to protect consumer interests as this form of trading and investment has risks that consumers may not be aware of. To ensure that consumers who deal in crypto products are not misled, they are advised to DYOR (Do Your Own Research).