June 17th, 2013 
CryptoBadger Gizmodo is reporting that Australian electronics retailer Millennius is now accepting both Bitcoin and Litecoin as forms of payment on its website. While quite a few global retailers have already adopted Bitcoin, Millennius believes that they’re the first to accept Litecoin.
Good news for cryptocurrency, and especially Litecoin—hopefully more retailers follow suit in the coming months.
June 15th, 2013 CryptoBadger Amazon has some of the new Radeon 7990 video cards available. These behemoths are essentially two 7970 GPUs on one card, but require less power than two individual 7970s. That package should make it quite a good choice for cryptocurrency mining, if you can stomach the price tag (although it currently comes with vouchers for 8 free games, which defrays the cost a bit if you choose to resell them).
Anyone tried mining with one of these yet? The speed/power consumption ratio should be comparable to a 7950 (the current king of mining), but with a huge advantage in potential GPU density.
June 13th, 2013 CryptoBadger 
Litecoin is starting to get attention in mainstream news as a complementary cryptocurrency to the more established Bitcoin. Business Insider posted a short piece today describing Litecoin as the “silver to Bitcoin’s gold”.
The article is short and largely inaccurate on the technical details, but any press that raises public awareness of digital currency is probably a good thing.
Edit 6/16: Looks like Wired UK is getting aboard the Litecoin train, too.
June 10th, 2013 CryptoBadger CNN is reporting on a “bitcoin baby” born to a couple that paid for their fertility treatment services with bitcoins:
[Dr. Lee, a fertility specialist] broached the subject with a few of his clients. If he offered a big discount, he asked, would they consider paying him with bitcoins?
“In some cases they reacted like I said I wanted to be paid in vials of crack cocaine,” he recalled.
Eventually, though, a few agreed to try it out. And then he hit the jackpot: A couple whom he helped conceive three previous babies came back to try for number four.
“They said, ‘Dr. Lee, we don’t understand this Bitcoin thing,’ but bless their hearts, they were willing to play along out of loyalty,” he said. “I offered them a 50% discount.”
June 6th, 2013 CryptoBadger 
Recently, a host of phishing sites that spoof the look of Mt. Gox have been showing up in ads from major advertising providers. The operators of these scam sites aim to trick visitors into downloading malware which enables them to steal your Mt. Gox login credentials, so they can then pilfer your account.
Nelp Net Security has some more information, including this snippet:
The fake pages were set up on domains that resembled Mt. Gox’s legitimate one (mtgox.com), such as mtgox.org, mtgox.co.uk, mtgox.net, and others. Also, the criminals have done a good job promoting the phishing site via ads (“New Century Gold: BITCOIN Protect your money – Buy Bitcoin”) served by several major online advertising services.
As always, whenever you visit a financial site (or any website dealing in sensitive information), make certain that the URL in your browser bar matches the one that you intended to visit.
June 5th, 2013 CryptoBadger Several of you have contacted me to ask about buying pre-assembled mining rigs over the past couple months. Some people don’t have the time and/or confidence to build their own, and would rather buy something that they can just plug in and have work so they can get into mining without the potential installation headaches.
Up until today, I’ve been telling people that I’m not in the business of selling mining rigs. After doing a bit of research on the options available for people that want to buy a pre-built mining rigs (it’s not pretty: expensive and underperforming 7970-based rigs, rigs that require external cooling, rigs that use ridiculous amounts of power, etc), I’ve decided to give it a try and see how it goes.
I expect the vast majority of you will be better served by reading my guide on how to build your own rig. But for those of you with more money than time and/or extreme technophobia, you’re welcome to take a look at what I’m offering.
June 3rd, 2013 CryptoBadger Techcrunch has an interesting article up about the potential future value of Bitcoin. Given that there will only ever be at most 21 million bitcoins in circulation, it’s a trivial exercise to calculate how much each coin will be worth, given some assumptions around which markets Bitcoin manages to capture.
The article includes an interactive calculator that lets you plug in your own values, although I would have liked to see some more options (where is the option for the internet/ecommerce market—where bitcoin has already arguably made the most progress)?
May 31st, 2013 CryptoBadger 
In the wake of the DHS seizure of a bank account tied to Mt. Gox and the government shutdown of Liberty Reserve, Fox News takes a look at the increasing regulatory scrutiny that digital currency exchanges are facing from the U.S. government. From the article:
“I really believe in complying and keeping track of bad guys,” said Peter Vessenes, CEO of a start-up called CoinLab, which is attempting to get full regulatory approval before launch. “But with all the different state rules we put in so much more time and energy … than we should have to.”
Despite the regulations, technology experts say that they will not prevent people from anonymously using bitcoins for illicit things like buying drugs online. The real-world analogy is cash; the government can tell when it is dispensed by banks, and to whom, but it loses track once it is dispensed.
“Bad people are going to do bad things. Right now the people who do the most bad things do it with cash,” Murck of the Bitcoin Foundation said.
May 28th, 2013 CryptoBadger If you use WeMineLTC as your litecoin mining pool, you should take a careful look at your earnings. There have been an increasing number of reports from miners that the pool is underpaying by ~30%, either because the operators are intentionally skimming, or because the pool is misconfigured. You can read more in this Reddit thread, or here on the Bitcointalk forums.
I have never used WeMineLTC, so I can’t comment personally. Mining pool scams certainly aren’t unheard of, so regardless of which pool you choose, make sure to keep an eye on your earnings to ensure that they’re in line with expectation (don’t forget to account for the pool’s fee, any pool or miner downtime, and internet latency).
Update 5/29: Apparently there was a vulnerability in WeMineLTC’s pool code that was exploited by some users to steal coins. It has been patched as of today.
May 23rd, 2013 CryptoBadger The Bitcoin network is now nearly an order of magnitude faster than the world’s 500 top supercomputers combined, and it’s getting bigger every day.
Pretty remarkable considering Bitcoin has only been around for four years.
