The last few weeks have been rather active when it comes to Bitcoin mining news, and one company in the Bitcoin mining industry has been shutdown by the FTC in the United States. Although much of the news in the Bitcoin mining hardware industry has been negative over the past few years, there are still some companies out there doing good, honest work. Let’s take a look at some of the latest news stories in Bitcoin mining.
Butterfly Labs Shutdown by FTC
Although many past customers felt like it was rather obvious, it seems that Butterfly Labs has finally been outed as a company involved in some shady business activities. After reports had surfaced regarding a raid on the Butterfly Labs offices, a document from the FTC was eventually leaked to the general public. The Federal Trade Commission is claiming that BFL mined bitcoins with their customers devices before those machines were eventually shipped. While it isn’t necessarily news to anyone familiar with how the Bitcoin mining hardware industry works, the FTC decided to target Butterfly Labs due to the large number of complaints they received from past customers. The FTC felt the complaints from customers were justified because customers were not informed that Butterfly Labs would be mining Bitcoins on the hardware they purchased.
GAWMiners Sells $1 Million of Mining Equipment in 24 Hours
Only a few weeks after introducing a new cloud mining program, GAWMiners has had a successful run of sales for their HashletSolo. The company is now sold out of this new piece of mining equipment, and they are looking forward to the launch of their Hashlet Genesis SHA-256 miners. GAWMiner’s Josh Garza has stated the HashletSolo should be viewed as a simple option for mining Bitcoins, and the target audience is the general public who may not have mined Bitcoins in the past. They’re the kind of mining hardware option that does not require much attention or maintenance, and Garza has also described them as “fun, powerful Bitcoin pocket rockets.”
Mining Bitcoins by Hand
One last story to note is that someone decided to mine Bitcoins the old fashioned way. When we say old fashioned, we don’t mean with a CPU or GPU. No Ken Shirriff decided to get a bit creative and mine Bitcoins by hand. Although Shirriff described Bitcoin’s SHA-256 mining algorithm as “simple”, he also noted that his mining process is much slower than what you could get from a modern ASIC miner. Shirriff noted that his hashrate was roughly 0.56 hashes per day, and he’s roughly ten quadrillion times less efficient than the current available hardware mining options. At the conclusion of his blog post on the experiment, Shirriff noted, “Needless to say, manual Bitcoin mining is not at all practical.”