Ethereum mining has become unprofitable, Firefox internet browser offers stronger cookie protection, and Bill Gates shares his stance on NFTs.
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That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now, welcome to Hashtag Trending. It’s Thursday, June 16, and I’m your host, Tom Li.
The high energy costs have made Ethereum cryptocurrency mining unprofitable. The price of Ethereum has dropped below $1,250 while energy prices continue to soar. Any miner paying more than $0.25 for electricity is now paying more for energy than the value of Ethereum being mined. At that price, a single Nvidia 3090 graphics card mining at 130 mega hashes per second costs miners $1.85 to $2.13 per day in electricity, but only returns about $2 in profit. Other popular cryptocurrencies such as Ergo yields and RavenCoin are dropping in value as well, according to CryptoSlate. In order for Ethereum to become profitable again, one of three things must happen: the hash difficulty needs to decrease, energy prices need to lower, or the value needs to rise above $1,400. This is a trend in Europe as well; with high electricity prices in the U.K. and Germany, GPU mining is unprofitable across most of Europe.
Source: Crypto Slate
Firefox users on the desktop will now be protected by the browser’s Total Cookie Protection feature by default. The company is calling the feature the “strongest privacy protection to date,” because it confines cookies to the site where they were created. That means it prevents the cookies from tracking user activity across multiple sites. Mozilla launched the feature last year and previously only enabled it when users turned on Firefox’s privacy mode. Now, all Firefox users on desktop can enjoy the benefits it brings without having to change any settings.
Source: Engadget
At a Tech Crunch event this week, Microsoft founder Bill Gates shared his disdain for non-fungible tokens. He described the value of NFTs to be “100 per cent based on greater fool theory.” Gates said that the only way to profit from NFTs is to find someone stupid enough to pay more for it than the previous buyer, Gizmodo reported. Gates also expressed his concerns on the risks behind blockchain, saying that he was worried that some users were abusing anonymity to commit crimes. This is not the first time Gates has opened up about his distaste for cryptocurrency. In 2018, he had said blockchain currency was killing people “in a fairly direct way” during a Reddit Q and A session.
Source: Gizmodo
China said its giant Sky Eye telescope may have picked up signs of alien civilizations, according to a report by the state-backed Science and Technology Daily. However, shortly after the publication appeared to have deleted the report about the discovery. According to Bloomberg, the narrow-band electromagnetic signals detected by Sky Eye differ from previous ones captured. It’s unclear why the report was removed from the website, though the news had already started trending on the social media network Weibo and was picked up by other media outlets. China’s Sky Eye is extremely sensitive to the low-frequency radio band and plays a critical role in space research.
Source: Bloomberg
That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast network. Add us to your Alexa Flash briefings or your Google Home daily briefing. Make sure to sign up for our Daily IT Wire newsletter to get all the news that matters directly in your inbox every day. Also, catch the next episode of Hashtag Tendances, our weekly Hashtag Trending episode in French, which drops every Thursday morning. If you have a suggestion or a tip, drop us a line in the comments or via email. Thank you for listening, I’m Tom Li.