When you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.
Facebook announces Libra cryptocurrency: All you need to know: The use cases, technology, and motive behind the new digital money
Facebook has finally revealed the details of its cryptocurrency Libra, which will let you buy things or send money to people with nearly zero fees. You’ll pseudonymously buy or cash out your Libra online or at local exchange points like grocery stores, and spend it using interoperable third-party wallet apps or Facebook’s own Calibra wallet that will be built into WhatsApp, Messenger, and its own app. Today Facebook released its white paper explaining Libra and its testnet for working out the kinks of its blockchain system before a public launch in the first half of 2020.
Facebook won’t fully control Libra, but instead get just a single vote in its governance like other founding members of the Libra Association including Visa, Uber, and Andreessen Horowitz who’ve invested at least $10 million each into the project’s operations. The association will promote the open-sourced Libra blockchain and developer platform with its own Move programming language plus sign up businesses to accept Libra for payment and even give customers discounts or rewards.
Facebook is launching a subsidiary company also called Calibra that handles its crypto dealings and protects users’ privacy by never mingling your Libra payments with your Facebook data so it can’t be used for ad targeting. Your real identity won’t be tied to your publicly visible transactions. But Facebook/Calibra and other founding members of the Libra Association will earn interest on the money users cash in that is held in reserve to keep the value of Libra stable.
Mastercard, Visa, eBay Drop Out of Facebook's Libra Payments Network
Move by the biggest payments companies leaves Facebook without the muscle it assembled to launch its ambitious cryptocurrency project
Oct. 11, 2019
The biggest financial companies that Facebook Inc. recruited to launch a cryptocurrency-based payments network have backed out of the project, threatening to derail an ambitious initiative to remake global finance before it ever gets off the ground.
Visa Inc., Mastercard Inc., Stripe Inc. and eBay Inc. said Friday they were withdrawing from the group of companies that had originally signed on to help launch the libra cryptocurrency, following PayPal Holdings Inc., which dropped out of the Libra Association last week.
The loss of four of the largest payments companies in the world leaves Facebook without the muscle it assembled to launch libra, a digital currency it hoped would make it a player in e-commerce and global money transfers. The project now mostly hinges on smaller payments companies, telecommunications providers, venture-capital firms, e-commerce merchants and nonprofits.
Some of the companies left open the possibility of rejoining the network in the future.
“Our ultimate decision will be determined by a number of factors, including the Association’s ability to fully satisfy all requisite regulatory expectations,” a Visa spokesperson said in an email. “Visa’s continued interest in Libra stems from our belief that well-regulated blockchain-based networks could extend the value of secure digital payments to a greater number of people and places, particularly in emerging and developing markets.”
When Facebook unveiled libra this summer, it announced that 27 other companies and organizations had agreed to back it. The idea was that merchants including eBay, Uber Technologies Inc. and Spotify Technology SA would accept libra as a form of payment, and that companies like Mastercard, PayPal and Stripe and would enable consumers and merchants to convert their national currencies into and out of libra.
The loss of Visa and Mastercard is a significant setback for libra. The credit and debit cards that run over their networks could have been an easy way for consumers to buy libra coins to use them for purchases. If those payment methods are no longer supported, that limits the options available to turn their funds into cryptocurrency.
Is any coin worth mining with a GPU? I have a Radeon RX5700. I've been trying to find info on this and it's hard to tell what is bullshit and what isn't.
Meh, I decided the easiest thing to do was to get setup on Cash App and setup an automated weekly Bitcoin buy for whatever cost I think it would be to run my rig. If I want Doge coin it looks like I could transfer bitcoin to binance.us and buy Doge.
I bought my first $100 of bitcoin last week. It's worth $109 now (should have bought more)
I do like Cash App because they verified my ID instantly and the app is simple to use.
I don't really know what I'm doing but I was bored and decided to try mining Ethereum with my RX5700. I flashed it with an RX5700XT bios and used the Radeon software to overclock the RAM. I'm gettin around 50-52 mh/s which seems to be about right for that card
To setup the miner I followed the instructions here and got up and running quickly
The block return is really high right now. whattomine.com shows it over 6. One video i saw from January said it was over 2 and the guy was excited about that. So maybe I'll make a few dollars.
A gym friend of mine posted a pic of him mining with his 3080 and 3900x, it estimated that he would earn about 380/month. i wonder what his electricity bill will be thou.
Not bad for a space heater. It is definitely making my bedroom warm as my wife made a comment that it was hot in here. Don't know if I'll keep it running full-time but here is the estimate for what it could do with Ethereum at $1700
This has been fun for me in that I found that it does require some GPU tuning otherwise I'm just wasting money on electricity.
After some research, I found that memory speed is more important for this card than GPU speed. Boosting memory speed by 50-100Mhz sees 1-2 more MH/s. The real surprising thing to me is that I was able to dial back GPU power by 40% before seeing any negative effect to MH/s. Originally my GPU was drawing 190W, now it's drawing about 117W.
I have an XFX 5700 and Gamer's Nexus had said that it has a memory cooling problem, indeed it does. Without any modifications from stock I was hitting 104C on memory temp and I think the card will throttle at that point. Taking off the rear backplate and extra plastic, as GN suggested, only got me a couple of degrees down. Messing around with the fan curve I was able to get it down to 94C at about 50% fan speed. I can get it down lower with higher fan speed but then the decibels start to get annoying.
I'm still dialing in the memory overclock. So far I can keep it stable at 1824Mhz. I was getting crashing over 1850Mhz but that was before I got the memory temp sorted so I may try that again.
I think I have this card dialed in as much as I can without switching to a mining bios and I have no desire to do that.
Settings from MSI After Burner.
Power Limit -40%. This ends up being about 780mV, 1230Mhz. Setting it lower than that and performance falls off a cliff.
Memory clock 1890Mhz. Higher than that doesn't increase performance.
I'm using lolminer and can get 53.20 mh/s. I tried Phoenix and RedTeam, they were a little lower in performance.
I may actually let it run overnight as I think it's stable now.
What’s the estimated earnings and power usage after all your tweaks?
When I was running at stock the AMD Radeon software was showing 190W for the GPU. Now it reports around 117W.
Looks like fully optimized I can get 53 mh/s. I was getting around 48 mh/s on stock settings.
My electric is 0.1378/kwh all in (taxes etc)
Current estimate from whattomine.com is $5.49 daily revenue with $5.06 daily profit after electric cost. I assumed my PC is pulling around 130W when I did that cost. I don't currently have a way to measure it.
The revenue estimate was higher on Thursday, the block reward is currently about half what I saw on Thursday. The block reward goes up when there is network congestion. My assumption though is this will trend down over time as every minute more miners are being added.
I'm not sure I'll keep it running if I can't make $5/day. At $5/day I can recover the cost of my PC in about 6 months so that would be cool.
I paid $300 for my 5700 on a 2019 black Friday deal. Now it looks like they go for more than double that on eBay.
I put a thermometer on my PC's top vent. With a room temp of 72F, there is 79F coming out of the PC.
Shit, if I knew I would have this much fun playing around with mining I would have started this last year. Now cards are too damn expensive.
I'm up $45 (0.02512 eth) in a little over a week and I spent a lot of that time screwing around with it so I think I did really good.
I've now switched to running HiveOS and I'm able to get my card down to 108W (as reported from software) at 52.5Mh/s. I know I said I wasn't going to screw around with the BIOS but I think I might as I could get up to around 56Mh/s.
I'm ready to pull a new circuit out of my electrical panel and run a 4 card rig in my basement but no way I'm going to spend $4k on cards.
I did mine Ravencoin for a day but in the end it is not worth it. I can earn 3x mining ETH. I can convert ETH to RVN and still be ahead of what I would earn mining RVN.
I should earn my first payout tomorrow or Saturday. The daily rate is now over $7. It's really annoying that I can't get more GPUs! Maybe what I will do is wait for the next crash and load up on more 5700 when they are cheap again.
For the upcoming RTX 3060, the software drivers for this graphics card will automatically limit cryptocoin hashing rates to half – making how much they can earn specifically halved. The software drivers will do this by detecting the math coming through the pipeline and restricting access to the hardware for those operations.
02-16-2018, 09:48 AM
(should have bought more)
Originally my GPU was drawing 190W, now it's drawing about 117W. 
