By now, you've probably heard about cryptocurrency and cryptomining, possibly because you too want to get a piece of that sweet, sweet speculative digital asset money.

If it were 2012, we'd be right there next to you, mining a couple of bitcoin or ethereum overnight on our laptops because it was an interesting project and you got a couple of neat digital tokens worth a couple of pennies out of it. No harm, no foul.

We are a long ways away from those halcyon days when cryptocurrencies were easy to mine on a smart phone because the blockchains they were based on had yet to sufficiently mature. 

Now, mining just a single digital token takes enormous effort, and while people are willing to pay a lot of money for those tokens, the chances of you mining sufficient bitcoin or ethereum on your personal computer to justify the power expense are all but nonexistent.

A lot of apps offer to let you mine cryptocurrency while your computer is idle though, dangling the prospect of free money in front of you to get you to download their app. 

Read the fine print, though – assuming the software is legit – and you're likely to find that these companies take a cut of every fraction of a digital token you mine during your computer's idle time. The goal isn't to help you earn money, the goal is to get thousands or tens of thousands of users to mine cryptocurrency for them.

So what should you do instead?

First and foremost, if you are not using your computer, the best thing to do is shut it off. 

Modern operating systems on reasonably modern hardware boot up in a few seconds, rather than the minute it might have taken five or ten years ago. There really isn't any reason to put your computer into low-powered sleep or hibernate mode anymore. 

But many of us still leave our computers idling all night for one reason or another, and you might be tempted to use that idle time for something productive. 

Instead of mining cryptocurrency, though, there are plenty of ways to use that idle computer time for a good cause, rather than setting the planet on fire to help venture capitalists who got in on the ground floor of bitcoin get even more obscenely rich than they already are.

What is distributed computing and how does it work?

The blockchain technology behind cryptocurrencies and NFTs operates on a distributed network, meaning that copies of a specific blockchain exist on multiple systems connected by a network and transactions on the blockchain are only added if a consensus of those systems agrees to add it.

What all that means isn't really important, but distributed computing works in a similar way wherein a program or a process within a program is computed across multiple systems connected by a network. 

So if you were to use distributed computing to run Google Chrome, for instance, you would have different computers on the network process different chunks of code, the results of which would be collected by one of the computers on the network tasked with managing everything and displaying the browser on a screen. 

On the plus side, you might finally have enough RAM to run Chrome, but the downside is that distributed computing isn't a very efficient way to run a web browser. What it can do super efficiently, however, is data crunching and complex modeling, i.e., the kind of work normally performed on supercomputers.

Programs on supercomputers are typically very basic, all things considered, but what they are doing is very computationally expensive. If you need to model a weather forecast for the next week, you typically have to factor in hundreds if not thousands of variables. 

If each variable can have ten values, modeling all possible potential weather forecasts would take 10 ^ 100 or 10 ^ 1,000 computations for each step in the model. This is the kind of thing that can grind a normal computer to a halt, and then grind it into dust over the next century as it tries to work through each computation one by one for years on end. 

But what if you gave 1,000 computers a subsection of that model to compute over a network and then have them return the results to a computer that collects the data and compiles it into usable forecast? Well that wouldn't take nearly as much time. That's the power of distributed computing, and its use in scientific and medical research has been growing for nearly two decades now.

The BOINC platform

The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) started as a platform for finding aliens. It was built at the University of California at Berkeley to enable the SETI@home program, which allowed volunteers to donate idle computer time to help process radio signals from space to look for possible signs of extraterrestrial life.

The SETI@home project itself is in "hibernation" for now while researchers conduct "back-end data analysis", but the distributed computing platform they built to run the SETI@home project is now widely used by universities and research institutions for other processing-intensive projects (as is the @home convention, as you'll soon see).

These include protein fold modeling to learn more about diseases like Covid-19, projects that study climate change and astronomical phenomena, and important areas of research in mathematics. 

While BOINC is safe to use, it is an open platform, so anyone can use it for their project without any kind of quality review. This means that some projects are more worthy of your idle computer time than others. 

The BOINC website has a good checklist of questions to ask before you start contributing to a project, including who is sponsoring it, are its goals clearly described and a productive use of your idle computer time, and whether the project has previously published results in peer-reviewed scientific journals (thus demonstrating that it is actually serious about the research it is conducting).

BOINC's website has a list of projects that "are known to us at BOINC, and we believe that their descriptions are accurate." While this isn't a full-throated endorsement of the projects on the list, it is still a place to start. 

We've pulled some of the most noteworthy projects that are sponsored by researchers at reputable universities and institutions, and which have a reputation for quality research.

• Einstein@home: searches for hard-to-detect signals from pulsars using  LIGO, Arecibo radio telescope, and Fermi gamma-ray satellite data.
• LHC@home: runs particle and accelerator physics simulations to improve the work of CERN's Large Hadron Collider.
• MilkyWay@home: works to create a three dimensional model of the Milky Way galaxy with a high level of accuracy using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
• MLC@Home: investigates complex machine learning models, specifically neural networks, to better understand how they work in an effort to advance real world safety of technology powered by machine learning systems.
• Rosetta@home: investigates protein folding structures to better understand a variety of diseases and look for potential therapeutics.

Projects that don't run on BOINC

There has been some criticism of BOINC in the past that it takes up a lot of processing power when in use, which can cause CPU fans to noisily speed up, which can by a problem for some when they are trying to sleep.

While we haven't experienced this ourselves, that criticism is out there, so if you're looking for a non-BOINC distributed computing project to volunteer for, we've included a few additional options below.

• Folding@home: after investigating novel protein structures in SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, the project has now moved on to investigating potential drugs that target these structures. Uses its own software and allows you to control when and how much processing power is volunteered.
• Stardust@home: analyzes the collection grid from NASA's Stardust mission to capture coma particles from the Wild 2 comet.
• DreamLab: you can also use you Android or iOS device to help medical research into several types of cancer, though for now the app is strictly devoted to Covid-19 research.
• Electric Sheep: while not beneficial in the same sense as medical or scientific research, this is a distributed platform for generating evolving fractal art and turning those visualizations into a funky screensaver. No, it's not out to cure cancer, but right now, we can all benefit from having something cool and mesmerizing to take our mind of the ongoing pandemic.

This article is part of TechRadar’s Tech Resolutions series, a motivating blast of encouragement showing you how to supercharge your new year with tech. Running from Sunday December 26 to Sunday January 2, our series will also reveal how we’re aiming to level-up our gadget lives in 2022. So whether you’re looking to become a Chromebook power-user, beat your takeaway obsession with a new air fryer, or use a smartwatch to propel you to new fitness heights, we’ll show you how to get your new year off to a flier. And when it all inevitably goes wrong, you can always blame the gadgets.

What’s the point of prognosticating if you can’t swing for the fences, amirite? Sure, you can go elsewhere and read predictions for a very incremental 2022, but you come to me for the wild stuff, the possibilities that will make you go, “Wow, didn’t see that coming.”

These predictions aren’t necessarily unhinged but I think most prove that while we can move the needle in key tech sectors, we’re also just as likely to muck it up or make the wrong choices. Case in point: in 2021 we’ve seen a raft of amazing wireless earphones that include water resistance and noises cancellation, and yet we still choose the most expensive option from Apple.

As we close out 2021 and step in 2022, I’d like to prepare you for what will inevitably be the two steps forward, one step back nature of all things technology.

Let’s get started:

The metaverse

2021 was the year Facebook forced us to confront the possibility of a virtual existence but the current reality of this unreality is less than ideal. That might change in 2022.

It’ll be full speed ahead for VR and NFT fans in a suddenly exploding Metaverse World where everyone’s bought cheap VR headsets from Meta ($99 sounds about right) and is locking down for an hour a day or more to have virtual meetings, play still-blocky Capture the Flag, and cook metaverse animals with digital spices.

We will shop for NFTs (worth even less in an all-virtual world) and virtual cars that we can then drive to our virtual friends’ houses, where we’ll take turns trying on Metaverse outfits.

Reports of people suffering from something called meta-aversion will be widespread.

Regulation

We’ve been talking about tech regulation for all of 2021, with endless hearings and even more posturing (by politicians and tech leaders).

In 2022, the U.S. government will stop holding hearings and pass, with President Biden’s signature, the first online bill of rights and regulations that will remake COPA and the Communications Decency Act’s Section 230, so that they all finally make sense—meaning these companies are no longer shielded from responsibility for the content on their platforms. Social media and tech firms will have exactly 12 months to fully comply with all the new rules or pay hefty fines each quarter.

Shortly after, lawmakers will realize that the new laws repeatedly mention Jack Dorsey as the CEO of Twitter (he left in 2021) and the company “Facebook” which no longer exists.

AR Glasses

After years of companies big, small, and vaporware jockeying for pole position in what will surely be one of the more impactful personal technology segments in years, augmented reality enters a new phase in 2022

Apple, Snapchat, Google, Meta, and 45 other companies will release their latest augmented reality glasses, but Apple will rule the day with $799 iGlasses that, while being significantly more expensive than, say, Google’s $99 NotGoggles, will sell 10 million units in the first quarter.

Space

Former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos got his astronaut badge and we launched Captain Kirk (William Shatner) into space, making 2021 the year of private citizen space junkets. However, space tourism is but the Kármán line of space possibilities. We still have Mars to attack and the moon the reexplore.

No one will make it back to the moon in 2022, but we will see the first private astronaut spacewalk. It would’ve been Jeff Bezos, but Blue Origin’s New Shepard only spends about 3 minutes in space on each launch—not nearly long enough to venture outside the capsule.

The task will ultimately fall to an upcoming SpaceX Dragon or Starship launch. Elon Musk himself will do the honors, stepping outside the capsule to affix a Dogecoin sticker to the gleaming silver surface of his spaceship.

Pandemic

2021 marked another chapter in this long and interminable pandemic existence. However, by 2022 our approach might look a little different.

With the world experiencing its sixteenth COVID variant (YaMomma), the CDC and WHO will launch a global vaccine pass for Android and iPhone that works with virtually every healthcare system, vaccination verification, and test-site and -result. No more cards, just phones you can tap against new NFC-based vax readers and go—everywhere (provided you have a mask and lots of hand sanitizer).

All of the systems will break when Apple releases iOS 16 and Google launches Android 13.

Internet stability

We learned a lot about how the Internet really works in 2021, most of it not so good. 2022 will be the start of people taking proactive steps to ensure its stability.

Tired of the all-too-frequent outages, governments around the world will propose massive redundancies for backbone systems. Unsure of what they mean by this, Amazon, Cloudflare, and others will unveil v2 of their cloud services. AWS2 and Cloudflare2 will launch in mid-2022 and crash for a few days in August 2022 and again in December.

5G

Thanks to 5G support across Apple iPhones and most major Android releases, plus the rapid expansion of 5G support from T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T, most of us have at least experienced a little bit of 5G’s formidable throughput power. We’ve also been mostly underwhelmed.

5G’s incredible promise will become reality in 2022. We’ll finally see traffic lights talking to each other and passing cars over 5G. A few overzealous car companies will add audio reminders that are triggered when a light notices a speeding car or one not slowing down for yellow. Sound systems will shout “Slow down!” at odd intervals, all thanks to the promise of 5G.

Robots

For many of us, the images of a troupe of robots dancing to “Do You Love Me,” (delivered just as 2020 was ending) is hard to shake. Those accomplishments may pale to what I think is in store for us in 2022.

Boston Dynamics and Jeff Bezos will partner up to deliver the first Bezos Bot, a robot that looks like Jeff Bezos but that shockingly has no interest in Star Trek, space, or online shopping. It will be a fitness buff, though, and will help its new owners get in shape with lots of curls.

In the meantime, Elon Musk’s teased humanoid robot will be delayed indefinitely as he claims that someone dumped a virus onto his robot development system back end. Bezos will reportedly be seen smiling sinisterly elsewhere.

Wearable technology

Roughly 100 million people now wear Apple Watches, and quite of few of them are doing it not just for the time or helpful pop-up notifications. They wear them to keep track of their health. The trend of on-your-wrist body diagnostics will accelerate in 2022.

We’ll see the first wearable blood draw from a startup known as Thernot. It won’t be widely adopted because—well, for so many obvious reasons. But Apple, Samsung, Fitbit, and others will read your blood sugar level without touching real blood, and other companies will look to add mobile saliva analyzers to the mix. Numerous complaints about people spitting on their watch in public scuttle their widespread adoption.

Chips

The silicon squeeze (chip shortages) is now expected to last well into 2023. However, that will not slow down chip innovation. The race is on for faster, smaller, and energy efficiency.

Intel, Apple, and AMD will introduce 1-nanometer concept chips that prove more powerful and power-efficient than any previous silicon.

Each company abandons its plans by the end of 2022 as they find they keep losing the microscopic chips halfway through the fab process.

RadioShack, once the source of tech gear, plugs, adapters, circuitry, and batteries (!) for legions of devoted geeks, is now an online cryptocurrency firm.

Two years after being purchased for scrap by investors Tai Lopez and Alex Mehr of Retail Ecommerce Ventures Review (REV), the 100-year-old RadioShack brand has reemerged as a completely new business focused on shepherding regular consumers into the crypto arena. It'll do this by helping them swap existing crypto for a new cryptocurrency known as DeFi.

There is, apparently, something of a business model here where the new RadioShack makes a profit on these swaps but beyond that, the entire plan and mission statement -- "we are going to lead the way for blockchain tech to reach mainstream adoption by other large brands" -- makes about as much sense as a new 3.5mm headphone jack splitter that doesn't end in USB-C.

"We will be the bridge between the CEO’s who lead the world’s corporations and the new world of cryptocurrencies," notes the newly updated RadioShack website.

To its credit, RadioShack explains in multiple documents and excruciating detail how it plans to make this all work, and how its DeFi currency and partnership with Atlas USV is somehow better and more stable than other crypto swaps.

The whole thing gets a little shaky when you realize that Tai Lopez and Alex Mehr (yes, the same people who bought RadioShack in 2020) are also the masterminds behind Atlas USV, which is, according to the site:

"[Atlas] Universal Store of Value (USV) is designed by Dr. Alex Mehr and Tai Lopez as a universal, decentralized, and widely accessible DeFi base layer, on which many future projects can be built by the Atlas community and its partners."

Perhaps this is why no one has heard of DeFi before, though there are many cryptocurrencies with "defi" in their name. Mehr and Lopez are the creators, owners, and crypto swappers in this new system.

The genius of this plan - if there is any - is that REV also owns a number of other semi-functional retail brands like Pier 1 and Dress Barn. It may be able to use Defi swap to create a crypto transaction system that could convert traditional currency revenues into Defi in the back end, which can then be moved about REV holdings.

RadioShack lives to fight another day, it seems. But as a virtual crypto bro, it's not even a shadow of its former self.

It's pretty hard to avoid talk of cryptocurrency these days, and with all the buzz it looks like even the tech giant Apple wants to get involved.

As reported by TechCrunch+, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple confirmed at the NYT Dealbook Conference, that the company is looking into Cryptocurrency, albeit with no fixed plans or details as to what that would entail. When asked if he personally owns popular currencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum, Cook confirmed that he did, stating that "I think it’s reasonable to own it as part of a diversified portfolio”, though he was quick to add that he's not giving anyone financial advice.

“I’ve been interested in it for a while. I’ve been researching it and so forth ... I think it’s interesting,” he added. While his curiosity appears to be from a personal perspective rather than that of the business, the idea that Apple itself would develop crypto services wasn't entirely dismissed, though we're a good few years off seeing anything come to fruition.

When journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin asked during the interview if Apple Pay or other Apple applications would accept cryptocurrency in the future, Cook simply stated that crypto is “something that we’re looking at", but did confirm that there are no plans to allow crypto to be used to buy Apple products.

To further add to the woe or excitement (depending what side of this divisive fence you're on), when Cook was asked for his feelings on NFTs, he replied that he also finds them “interesting” but that “it will take a while to play out in a way that is for the mainstream person.”

Analysis: Times are moving fast

Take all this with a grain of salt as it doesn't confirm that Apple has any plans beyond simply investigating if both Cryptocurrency and NFTs will be a worthwhile investment, which is a fairly safe move for a Tech company of this scale. 

Given other large companies are getting involved, such as EA claiming that NFTs are part of the future of the games, and Tesla investing in Bitcoin (and previously allowing customers to purchase cars with the digital currency), ignoring the possibility that this really is the future of tech dealings wouldn't be wise.

After all, if Blockbuster had bought Netflix when it had the chance rather than denying that streaming would overtake physical rentals then it might have survived. It pays to be overly cautious and keep adapting with the times.

It might feel like NFTs and new cryptocurrencies are appearing like a flood, which can feel overwhelming but if one of the largest tech companies in the world (and one that prides itself on innovation at that) is playing things safe, then you shouldn't feel pressured to jump on board either. There's a good chance that all of this will have flopped in the next five years and something entirely new will be touted as the 'future of tech'.

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Mr. Goxx is just like many other young investors: he's been dabbling in cryptocurrencies, lives in a minimalist studio and keeps fit with daily cardio. What makes him slightly different from other traders you may have come across on social media, is that Mr. Goxx is a hamster, but don't be too quick to judge – he's up by almost 20% on lifetime career performance and is actually making money on his investments.

In fact, Mr. Goxx is so successful that he isn't beholden to a traditional 9-5 schedule, instead selecting his own working hours. A dedicated 'office' is attached to his everyday cage which he has the freedom to move between, and when he clocks in, a series of automated actions will post a message to his Twitter, updating his followers that a trading session has started, and his Twitch channel will start to broadcast for as long as he's working.

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Given how complex this operation is for something with small, furry paws, it's unsurprising that he has help in the form of two anonymous humans who help him run his business. 

As reported by the BBC, Mr Goxx and his investment firm Goxx Capital (a reference to Mt. Gox, a Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange that operated between 2010 and 2014) was started as a joke between two men from Germany who saw people dumping money into cryptocurrency, despite having little understanding on crypto trading.

"It seems like most people from our generation see no other chance than throwing a lot of their savings on the crypto market, without having a clue what's going on there. We were joking about whether my hamster would be able to make smarter investment decisions than we humans do."

Don't take financial advice from rodents

Let's get a few things out of the way: please don't take trading or financial advice from Mr Goxx. He's a hamster and has no understanding of complex investments. 

Similarly, we're not advising that you trade according to his streams either as this is entirely down to luck, unless we've been severely under-estimating hamsters' abilities to become self-made entrepreneurs. Mr Goxx's owners are also careful to remind his followers that Goxx Capital isn't a real trading company with every tweet he posts.

Mr Goxx also isn't forced to do any trading and has complete freedom to move between his 'trading office' and his regular living space. If he wants to have a lazy day in bed, he's not obligated to head into work. The entire process is automated, with a wheel selecting what currency will be traded, and then finalized when he runs through either his 'buy' or 'sell' tunnels. 

While this project may just be a joke, as of September Mr Goxx's career performance is up 19.41%, which according to Protos means he's outperforming Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and the S&P 500, as well as many other successful investment firms. Despite this, the profits from his investments (which started at $390 / €326 /£278) haven't even covered the cost of his cage so he'd best hope his asset portfolio continues to grow.

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The latest release of NBMiner, a popular Ethereum cryptomining tool, has significantly cut into cryptomining limiter on Nvidia's RTX Light Hash Rate (LHR) graphics cards.

According to VideoCardz, the new update to the NBMiner tool improves the cryptomining efficiency of RTX 3000-series LHR graphics cards up to 70%, up from the 50% implemented by Nvidia in an attempt to stop the new graphics cards from being bought up wholesale by cryptominers and not gamers and enthusiasts.

The new update only applies to Ethereum mining using the ethash algorithm, and it doesn't "unlock" the LHR restriction. Instead, it is more of a hack or workaround that improves mining efficiency on this one algorithm by up to an additional 20%, though the recommending setting is 68% rather than the full 70%.

Whether this update inspires more cryptominers to consider using the RTX LHR GPUs remains to be seen.

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Analysis: Nvidia's fight against cryptomining continues

All new Nvidia RTX 3000-series GPUs, other than the RTX 3090, come with Nvidia's hashrate limiter, first introduced with the RTX 3060. The hash rate limiter got off to a rocky start though, and cryptominers started finding workarounds on early versions of the limiter. 

Nvidia even messed up the early rollout of the has rate limiter by accidentally releasing a beta driver from an Nvidia-partner that disabled the hash rate limiter entirely.

The limiter introduced in later GPUs, however, proved to be much more effective, keeping new RTX 3060, RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 3070, RTX 3070 Ti, RTX 3080, and RTX 3080 Ti GPUs safely locked in at the 50% mining efficiency.

This hasn't stopped cryptominers, however, and as cryptocurrency prices recover somewhat from their crash a few months ago, we can expect cryptominers to become more of a headache for Nvidia as it tries to get more of its graphics cards into the hands of gamers. 

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The AMD RX 6600 XT isn't even a week old and it's already sold out at major retailers just like every other graphics card. But if new reports about its cryptomining hashrate are true, this card might be even harder to find in the weeks and months ahead.

According to Reddit user Trollatopoulous (flagged by Wccftech), AMD's latest midrange graphics card has the best cryptomining performance of any graphics card to date.

6600_xt_is_lowkey_the_best_mining_gpu_in_history from r/Amd

While a mining hashrate of just 32MH/s might not sound like a lot next to the RTX 3090's 125MH/s, cryptomining performance isn't just about raw power. All those mining rigs need electricity to run and the more powerful the GPU, the more energy it's going to need to mine bitcoin, ethereum, or any other cryptocurrency. Unless you're stealing electricity, you're going to need to pay for that power consumption, and electricity costs are a crucial variable in assessing cryptomining profitability.

That's what would make the RX 6600 XT so special. Apparently, it's able to achieve a hashrate of 32MH/s using only 55W, which is much more efficient than getting 114MH/s from 320W as in the case of the RTX 3090, which is 3.5 times faster but consumes nearly six times as much energy. With 330W of energy running six RX 6600 XTs, you could get a combined hashrate of 192MH/s.

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We haven't found the RX 6600 XT listed on any of the cryptomining performance charts we follow online like krytex.org, which are much more authoritative than a random Reddit poster, so until this hashrate is more widely confirmed we can't say for sure if there is truly a new cryptomining champion. But if the Reddit prediction does pan out in the next few days and weeks, these cards are going to get much harder to find.

Graphics cards are already scarce due to a slurry of semiconductor scarcity, pent up consumer demand, and high cryptocurrency prices fueling the explosion of cryptomining around the world. This latter factor though has seen a lot more volatility lately, as governments like China and the US start cracking down more aggressively on the practice.

There is also a greater push from within the cryptomining community itself to find "greener" ways to mine cryptocurrencies, since the ongoing Climate Crisis is leading more of the public to look critically on the enormous energy consumption of cryptomining. This, in turn, will likely increase pressure for more regulation on cryptomining as it is pretty low-hanging fruit when it comes to curbing emissions, should governments ever start actually taking real steps towards reducing our current level of emissions.

More efficient graphics cards are therefore going to see much more demand in the future, since profit margins are likely to be thinner and power consumption becomes a much bigger factor than processing power. In short, if the RX 6600 XT's hashrate and power consumption is in line with this report, crypto-related demand for these cards will remain high even as it falls for other, more power-hungry cards like the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090.

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Malaysian authorities have taken to an extreme measure to prove the point that it is illegal to steal electricity in order to run cryptomining rigs: crush them with a steamroller.

The video making the rounds shows what looks like Antminers laid out and filling a parking lot at a police headquarters before the ruthless hands of justice drove an actual, honest-to-God steam roller over the entire lot of them. 

The 47-second video doesn't show each and every device getting crushed, but according to PC Gamer, none of the 1,069 illicit mining rig was spared, which is definitely not nice.

The offending computers were seized in six raids conducted jointly by Malaysian police and Sarawak Energy Berhad (SEB) around an airport in the Sarawak region, where miners had allegedly tapped into SEB power lines to divert as much as $2 million in electricity to power the rigs.

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Analysis: the staggering cost of cryptomining isn't just an expensive graphics card

In addition to the outrageous prices being charged online for graphics cards like the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 – even among legitimate retailers – there is a much greater cost to the cryptomining craze of the past few years. 

Despite what cryptocurrency advocates claim, actual scientists who study the effects of cryptomining on the environment are pretty much in agreement that it's an ecological disaster. 

Cryptomining, globally, requires 110,000,000,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity each year, while all of the solar panels in the United States produced only 90,000,000,000 kilowatt-hours in 2020.

You can say that this energy diversion is well spent if you believe cryptocurrencies have utility beyond holding critical national infrastructure hostage for ransom, buying drugs online, or money laundering, but it is energy diversion. 

It might not be as explicit as in this case in Malaysia where miners literally tapped into a power line and diverted electricity from legitimate use, but a single watt of electricity used to process blockchain transactions and generate bitcoin anywhere is one less watt available for everything else. 

We don't stop powering our homes for some discrete amount of time in order to mine bitcoin. We power our world and we mine bitcoin. This isn't going to change, so no matter how much crypto advocates try to green up crypto, it is still an increasingly heavy anchor on our efforts to combat climate change. 

All one needs to do is look out the window of a New York City office this week and see the hazy smoke from west coast wildfires to know that this is untenable if we want a reasonably livable planet in the years to come. Against that reality, crushing 1,069 mining rigs beneath a steamroller is woefully insufficient, but it's a start.

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Seriously? What do you think? We gather some of the best tech journalists from all over the internet to argue about the biggest tech topics for your enjoyment. 

This week TechRadar Staff Writer Hamish Hector, Laptop Mag Senior Writer Sean Riley, and Tom's Guide Senior Editor Henry T. Casey all try to convince Matt that the future of NFTs could be an exciting one.

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Confused and skeptical

Matt and his guests dive into the controversial world of NFTs to find out what they are, how you make one, how you buy one, and ultimately, should you care about them?

Along the way, the discussion turns to art, the environment, group-think, basketball, and the power of Elon Musk’s tweets. 

Henry T. Casey explains that understanding NFTs should help you not get ripped off, and is convinced that NFTs might be being fuelled by hype, but Sean Riley believes there could be value in supporting your favorite creators.

Meanwhile, Hamish Hector compares NFTs to the Mona Lisa.

You can watch Seriously? episode 7 above and find our what our experts think. New episodes of Seriously? roll out every two weeks on a Wednesday, and you can catch-up on the entire series via the links below 

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NFT, or non-fungible token, has become 2021’s ‘blockchain’, a word you’ve never heard of before that is suddenly everywhere. Be it Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey auctioning his first tweet, or the Kings of Leon selling their latest album, as one, NFTs are everywhere. But what is an NFT?

Some see it as the latest fad, a new crypto-esque bubble that’s guaranteed to pop eventually, while others think NFTs could have an important role in the future of digital art.

We can’t say for certain which it will be for now, but read on to discover everything you need to know about NFTs, and our insight into why they’re worth watching.

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What is an NFT? 

As we've mentioned, ‘NFT’ stands for non-fungible token, but what does that mean?

If something is fungible that means it isn’t unique, it’s a commodity. Dollar bills are fungible, two bills of the same value are for all intents and purposes identical. Apples are fungible, your box of cornflakes is fungible, your PS5 is fungible. 

However, if your PS5 has been turned into artwork by drawing on it or adding decoration – as you might have seen online – then it has become something non-fungible.

Think of the Mona Lisa. You could take a photo of it and hang it on your wall but it wouldn’t be the same – or have the same value – as the Mona Lisa that resides in the Louvre. Much like other original paintings, the Mona Lisa is non-fungible, in that it's unique.

A non-fungible token is a digital interpretation of that. Someone might have a copy of the same digital artwork, but it’s not the original file.

So are NFTs pointless? 

It’s certainly an odd idea to wrap your head around. When something is digital, the original file and a copy of it are seemingly identical. For some people though there is a ‘specialness’ to that original file that makes it unique.

While this might seem like those people are imposing an imaginary value on it, it’s not that different to the Mona Lisa example in many ways. Fundamentally the Mona Lisa painting and a copy of it are of the same image; it's just that people have imposed qualities on the original that give it value.

With NFTs it’s that same idea. But while you might not be convinced about them just yet, going forward there may be more tangible benefits to NFT ownership.

What’s the future of NFTs? 

Here things get tricky. Some see NFTs as just the latest fad, which like the ‘GameStonks’ bubble will pop eventually and leave many winners and losers in its wake. However, there are some interesting ideas that could mean NFTs survive. 

One example could see content creators reward their biggest fans based on NFT ownership. Potentially creators could host a stream or Q&A where only owners of certain NFTs – or a certain number of the creator’s NFTs – can take part.

You could then see people selling their collection of NFTs if they decide to move on from a certain artist. Think of it like a digital version of selling old albums: the seller gets their investment back, and a new fan can catch up with everything that’s come before.

With reselling there’s also the option for NFT creators to stipulate that if an NFT is resold, they get a cut. It’s common for art to become more valuable over time, and this would give artists the opportunity to benefit from that increase in value.

None of this guarantees that NFTs won’t still just be a fad, but they leave open a range of interesting possibilities that mean they're certainly worth keeping an eye on.

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Nvidia just officially announced new LHR or ‘Light Hash Rate’ graphics cards which have their Ethereum crypto-mining performance slashed to deter miners from buying the GPUs, but these models will only come from third-party card manufacturers – there won’t be any new LHR spins on the Founders Edition range.

The Founders Edition graphics cards, which are the models made by Nvidia itself, weren’t mentioned in yesterday’s big revelation of LHR models for RTX 3080, RTX 3070, and RTX 3060 Ti GPUs (the RTX 3060 had mining countermeasures applied back in February, but they were circumvented – which hopefully won’t happen with this new approach).

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This led our sister site PC Gamer to get in touch with Nvidia to determine whether the Founders Edition models could get an LHR spin, too, but Team Green replied in no uncertain terms: “Founders Edition is a limited production graphics card sold at MSRP, and at this point we don’t have plans to make versions with LHR.”

Vanishing point

Given that stock of Nvidia’s own graphics cards has been vanishingly thin anyway – more so even than third-party cards, which have had severe stock issues of their own, of course – this is arguably not a huge deal. It might just, however, point to the winding up of production of Founders Edition models for the RTX 3080, 3070 and 3060 Ti full-stop, as PC Gamer theorizes (although we should obviously be cautious about drawing any conclusions here).

This could make sense given the rumored impending release of the RTX 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti variants, of course, because if those cards are indeed unleashed by Nvidia in the near future, they’ll represent a more tempting proposition – and Nvidia already has its production capacity stretched as it is, and those resources will only get more stretched if bringing new models into the mix.

The whole point of LHR spins is to usher in better availability so gamers can actually buy Ampere GPUs, so fingers crossed that the hash limiter sticks this time, and combined with dedicated cards for crypto-miners (CMPs), we could witness a tilting of the supply and demand seesaw more in favor of the former (finally).

The new anti-mining GPUs will begin shipping late in May, in a week or so, and will be clearly labeled as ‘LHR’ on the box to avoid any confusion with existing non-limited Ampere cards.

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When Nvidia announced the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, it said that not only would it have limitations in place for Ethereum mining, but that Team Green would be releasing specialized GPU boards for mining – and images of one of those boards has leaked out. 

You can find the pictures over at Videocardz, along with the rumored specs of the cards. The Gigabyte CMP 30HX that's pictured over there isn't just an RTX 3080 without display output. Instead, it's based on the TU116 GPU, which is found in the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 – so it's not exactly a powerhouse. 

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Still, while the GTX 1650 was never the best graphics card in Nvidia's lineup, the 30HX, according to the rumored specifications on Videocardz, will provide an Ethereum Hash Rate of 26MH/s. However, if the images of this Gigabyte card are accurate, it looks like it will come with an extremely robust cooler, that extends further than the PCB, which will do an excellent job of keeping the card cool during intense mining workloads. 

We still don't know when these crypto-focused graphics cards are coming, but hopefully it makes it easier for people to get their hands on cheaper versions of Nvidia Ampere graphics cards. The 26MH/s hashrate of this rumored CMP 30HX likely won't put a dent in the demand for the RTX 3080 or RTX 3090, but it might make more mainstream cards more available. 

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Nvidia has announced its earnings for the second quarter of the 2020 financial year, and it appears that the graphics giant is still feeling the effects of the death of cryptocurrency, with revenue falling by 17%.

A few years ago, the cryptocurrency craze was in full swing, with people able to make a decent amount of money using their graphics cards to ‘mine’ for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum.

This led to a surge in graphics card sales, with Nvidia (and particularly AMD) enjoying spectacular results (despite shortages in stock).

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The huge popularity of cryptocurrency couldn’t go on forever, and when it became harder to make money, sales for graphics cards dropped off sharply.

This was a big blow to Nvidia’s revenues, and as its recent results show, it’s still being impacted. However, while on paper these results don’t look that great, they actually beat analyst expectations, with $2.58 billion (compared to $2.54 billion). This news helped Nvidia’s stock rise by 7%.

Strength in gaming

According to the results, Nvidia’s gaming products remain its biggest revenue driver, bringing in $1.31 billion, compared to $1 billion last quarter, and still accounts for over 50% of Nvidia’s total revenue.

While it was up compared to the last quarter, gaming revenue was actually down from $1.8 billion a year ago, again highlighting how much the end of the cryptocurrency craze is impacting Nvidia.

So while things look bad, it at least seems like Nvidia has turned a corner, once again thanks to its gaming division.

“Essentially our business is normalized,” Nvidia’s chief financial officer Colette Kress said. An increase in sales for gaming laptops using Nvidia tech, as well as the success of Nintendo’s Switch console (which uses Nvidia graphics) and the announcement of the Switch Lite, all point to a rosier future.

While ‘returning to normal’ isn’t the most exciting of results, in these uncertain times – and with a possible US/China trade war looming – that seems to be good enough for Nvidia.

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Via Reuters

A blockchain startup named Tron has bought file sharing company BitTorrent for a reported sum of $126 million (about £96 million, AU$170 million).

According to a statement BitTorrent's will continue to operate from Tron's offices in San Francisco, "pursuing its vision for the world’s largest decentralized ecosystem."

Cutting out the middle man

Tron is essentially a decentralized platform for sharing entertainment content, including music and games. By using blockchain and peer-to-peer network technology, it aims to cut out the middle man between content producers and consumers (ie the tech giants like Google and Amazon).

BitTorrent is one of the biggest names in peer-to-peer file sharing, with 100 million users. It was founded in 2004, long before reliable, fast broadband made streaming music and movies feasible, and owns both its own branded torrent client and uTorrent (the latter of which is the most popular client software outside China).

The two clients are free to download, and supported by ads. Last month BitTorrent published a statement to assure users that it wouldn't be changing its business model to enable mining of cryptocurrency – possibly in preparation for its acquisition by Tron, which has its own TRX currency. 

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Via Engadget

IBM has made a computer which is smaller than a grain of salt, and the miniature marvel will be unveiled later today at the firm’s Think 2018 conference.

The tiny computer bristles with several hundred thousand transistors and measures approximately 1mm squared, and has the computing power of an x86 chip from back in 1990, as Mashable reports (the above image from IBM shows two of the compact computers nestling in the top-left of the board).

It’ll cost less than 10 cents to produce these grain-sized computers but, obviously enough, they aren’t something you’ll be running Microsoft Word on. The tiny devices are part of IBM’s vision for future technology – they will be ‘cryptographic anchors’ embedded in everyday objects, used to ensure the object’s authenticity in combination with blockchain tech.

In other words, this is an anti-fraud measure. At any point in the supply chain, counterfeit goods can potentially be introduced, but if the real devices have these tiny chips in them, they can be physically verified as the genuine article.

Joining the dots

They could be applied to expensive gadgets so you can be sure you’re buying the real thing and not a knock-off, or these tiny computers could even be embedded in things like malaria pills as (edible) ink dots, again to ensure that patients are getting the genuine drug and not a fake.

IBM is testing the initial prototype at the moment, and it’s not clear when these ‘dot’ computers will make the transition from the research labs to the market, although the company says it will be ‘soon’.

The firm observed: “These technologies pave the way for new solutions that tackle food safety, authenticity of manufactured components, genetically modified products, identification of counterfeit objects and provenance of luxury goods.”

As mentioned, all this will happen in combination with blockchain technology, which we discussed further in this feature: Bitcoin vs distributed ledger vs Ethereum vs blockchain.

Top image credit: IBM

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A popular calendar app for the Mac has disappeared from Apple’s App Store after it was found to be mining cryptocurrency without the user’s permission.

We should note right off-the-bat that the app in question, Calendar 2, was upfront about its usage of the Mac’s CPU for mining cryptocurrency (Monero), and this was actually concocted as a (rather novel) alternate payment method to unlock premium features.

In other words, Calendar 2 had both a free version and a version with advanced features that could be unlocked via a one-off or subscription payment – but if you didn’t fancy either of the former, you could unlock the additional features by giving the app permission to use your processor to mine cryptocurrency.

Mining without permission

The problem was that even if the user was running the free version of the app, and hadn’t given said permission, the software was still mining cryptocurrency – and this happened thanks to a bug, the developer (Qbix) explained.

As Apple Insider reports, Qbix founder Gregory Magarshak also admitted that a second bug existed which caused the mining process to consume more CPU cycles than the intended 10-20% of processor usage.

Following these discoveries, Magarshak issued a statement to say he was removing the mining feature from the app, but Calendar 2 subsequently got yanked down from the Mac App Store (and remains unavailable at the time of writing).

It’s not clear whether the developer removed the app or Apple pulled the software. What also isn’t clear is Apple’s stance on this potential new way of paying to unlock premium features.

Mining minefield

Certainly this episode points out the potential dangers in running such a cryptocurrency mining scheme to unlock an app’s advanced features, most notably the possibility of mining happening without the user’s consent or knowledge.

The other potential bugbear here is the fact that the miner was grabbing more than the intended processor usage, and policing that could be a tricky matter. That said, if loads of CPU resources are being erroneously grabbed, the impact on the Mac’s performance will obviously become quite noticeable.

Indeed, surely Apple will be concerned if this sort of mining payment method is in danger of appearing to make its computers seem like they’re running sluggishly.

Still, there will doubtless be attractions for some in what’s certainly an innovative way to get premium features for what seems like a very small outlay, but we have to bear in mind that it is a continuous outlay (and the increased level of CPU usage will draw extra power which will be reflected on your electricity bill).

We’ll just have to see what happens in the future with Calendar 2, and more broadly, whether Apple will take a stand against this sort of scheme in its terms for developers hoping to get their wares on the App Store.

Let’s not forget that all this, of course, is happening against a backdrop of increasingly prevalent crypto-mining malware.

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Via Apple Insider

According to a new report on the GPU market, AMD has made good ground selling graphics cards at the expense of Nvidia, apparently making big gains from cryptocurrency miners.

The most recent add-in graphics board report from Jon Peddie Research covers the final quarter of 2017, and finds AMD making a big, 6.5% gain when it comes to the discrete GPU market (i.e. separate graphics cards, as opposed to integrated graphics).

AMD’s market share rose from 27.2% in Q3 to 33.7% in Q4, while Nvidia dropped by a corresponding amount, falling from 72.8% to 66.3%.

Perhaps as interesting as that shift was the further revelation that over three million graphics cards were sold to cryptocurrency miners during the course of 2017, accounting for revenue of $776 million (£560 million, AU$990 million).

More importantly, Jon Peddie observes that AMD was the 'primary benefactor' of those cryptocurrency-based sales.

Advantage AMD?

Digging a little deeper here, then, it appears that the huge cryptocurrency boom that kicked off late last year has been doing AMD more of a favor than Nvidia. This perhaps goes some way to explain why Nvidia has been doing more to appear to be fighting the consumer’s corner when it comes to the availability of graphics cards for gamers.

We’re talking about the recent measures aiming to prevent miners from bulk ordering graphics cards from retailers, and Nvidia’s general stance that ‘gamers come first’ regarding GPUs.

And, maybe that’s a reason more gamers will be looking to buy Nvidia graphics cards in the future, because they feel more supported by the firm than AMD. We'll see whether this pans out in the next market share study.

Although that said, the reality of buying a graphics card now is that it’s still a difficult quest to try and avoid getting massively overcharged for a decent model. Demand is that high, and supply is simultaneously constrained due to a bottleneck with video memory production – and those forces aren’t going anywhere in the near term.

The situation is likely to continue as we move forward into 2018 and probably for a good while, unless there’s a major development with cryptocurrency – i.e. the market somehow implodes. That may not be completely beyond possibility, but at this point certainly doesn’t look likely.

Meanwhile, it will definitely be interesting to see if AMD can keep on making inroads into Nvidia’s GPU territory – cryptocurrency sales or not.

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In March 2014 Newsweek published an article identifying California resident Dorian Nakamoto as "The Face of Bitcoin," which Nakamoto says he isn't.

Now Nakamoto, with the aid of a a legal defense fund that appears to have been established by the larger Bitcoin community itself, intends to sue the publication.

Nakamoto is not orchestrating the fund and lawsuit personally, but it is "authorized and endorsed" by him, according to the site newsweeklied.com.

The site is accepting donations via check, money order, credit card, and - naturally - Bitcoin and Bitpay.

Strong accusations

Nakamoto had reportedly never heard of Bitcoin before the Newsweek article accused him of being its creator.

The site accepting donations for the suit against the publication alleges that the article's author altered and invented quotes from Nakamoto and his family, and that she likely knew she was wrong when she wrote it.

A photo shows Nakamoto holding a sign that says the article "hurt [his] family."

We asked the article's author, Leah McGrath Goodman, for a comment on the site, and we'll update if we hear back.

The bottom of it

Bitcoin is confusing, but there are resources that can shed some light on the phenomenon, including TechRadar's article on understanding Bitcoin and crypto-currency.

Here's a convenient bottom line, though: if Valve CEO Gabe Newell doesn't trust it, then you probably shouldn't either.

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Although the digital currency is facing some troubles, ABA Technology has today opened Australia's first Bitcoin ATM in Sydney.

Located in Westfields shopping centre on Pitt Street Mall in Sydney CBD, the Bitcoin ATM, which looks like any other ATMe ATM, will allow users to buy and sell the crypto-currency, or exchange it for cash.

Of course, you'll need to have a current Bitcoin wallet in order to use the ATM, and all first time users will need to register on the ATM as well to be able to use the machine.

Struggling currencies

The Bitcoin ATM launch in Sydney comes amid news that the National Australia Bank (NAB) will be closing the accounts of businesses who primarily trade in crypto-currencies, including Bitcoin, in early May.

Earlier this year, the biggest Bitcoin exchange in the world MtGox filed for bankruptcy.

However, despite all of this, the company behind the launch of the ATM today, ABA Technology (or Australian Bitcoin ATMs), has plans to launch hundreds of Bitcoin ATMs across Australia over the coming years, with a Melbourne ATM set to open in a few weeks time.

"Our goal is to provide consumers with the advantages of the Bitcoin digital currency world, and enable the mass market to buy and sell Bitcoin in a safe and secure environment," said ABA Technology CEO Chris Guzowski.

"We have completed a further capital raising from new and existing investors that will help accelerate the expansion plans."

• Are you eager to use the Bitcoin ATM? Are you still confused about what this crypto-currency are? Here is Bitcoin and crypto-currencies explained

Bitcoin exchange MtGox has filed for bankruptcy protection in the United States.

MarketWatch reported the defaulted Bitcoin exchange filed for Chapter 15 in the States to protect itself from lawsuits as it attempts to pay off its 6.5 billion yen (about $64m, £38m, AU$71m) debts.

MtGox previously filed for bankruptcy protection in Japan on February 28, which only helped those in Tokyo and the US. With this new measur, foreign debtors and parties who lost their bitcoins on the MtGox can go through the US bankruptcy courts and systems to resolve their cases.

Earlier last month, MtGox lost track of 750,000 Bitcoins deposited by users as well as 100,000 of its own digital coins. As one of the largest Bitcoin exchanges, it held more than 6% of the world's cryptocurrency, worth roughly $549 million (about £329m, AU$608m) by today's trading rates.

Can't catch a break

In another bit of bad news, over the weekend hackers cracked into MtGox CEO Mark Karpeles' personal blog MagicalTux.net as well as his Tumblr and Reddit accounts.

The hackers used their access to post a zip file entitled MtGox2014Leak that claimed to reveal evidence of MtGox wrongdoing. Alleged internal documents inside the compressed archive claimed to reveal how the defunct exchange stole customer holdings and wrote them off as targets of theft.

The file and Karpeles' personal blog have already been taken down, but not before users on Twitter and Reddit supposedly confirmed their personal account balances on the included Excel spreadsheet, potentially verifying its legitimacy.

It's likely the same document also held passwords connected with MtGox, so we strongly urge users to change any of the same passwords they may have used elsewhere.

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