In a Sept. 27 press release, Core Scientific announced the acquisition of blockchain mining company Stax Digital, the creator of the most widely used GPU mining program, Honeyminer.
Blockchain and artificial intelligence startup, Core Scientific has acquired Stax Digital to further develop its infrastructure and software solutions.
Honeyminer, is a mining app that runs in the background, using the central processing unit and graphics processing unit of users’ computer to mine Bitcoin.
Creator of Honeyminer
Stax Digital’s CEO, Noah Jessop, said:
“With Core Scientific’s incredible hardware abilities-and now Honeyminer’s best-in-class optimizations and global software platform, together we are poised to offer best-in-class mining solutions within our data centers or embedded in any computer or device in the world.”
CEO Kevin Turner took the helm of Core Scientific in 2018, after spending 11 years at Microsoft from 2005 to 2016, leading the company’s global sales and marketing teams. Turner had this to say about the recent acquisition:
“We are very excited to close this transaction and welcome the Stax Digital team to Core Scientific. Their IP and proven experience in blockchain will enable us to continue enhancing the capabilities of our best-in-class blockchain hosting and application solutions.”
Honeyminer available on MacOS
Cointelegraph reported in May that the Honeyminer app had found its way onto the Apple Macintosh operating system. The Honeyminer team said:
“Now, in addition to the thousands of different hardware devices on PC we support, we are announcing general availability to mine with Honeyminer within the Apple Macintosh ecosystem.”
Aragon Opposes Change to Ethereum’s Mining Algorithm Before 2.0 Version
The Aragon community has officially proclaimed itself against ProgPOW. ProgPOW is a proposed protocol change to the Ehereum network that would close the efficiency gap available to application-specific integrated circuits.
In a tweet on Nov. 2, the official account of the Aragon project posted voting results, showing that a proposal to block changes to Ethereum’s mining algorithm had passed.
ProgPOW would change the Ethereum network’s proof-of-work mining algorithm before the eventual switch to a proof-of-stake model as part of the Ethereum 2.0 roll-out. Aragon, which is an open-source software project for creating and managing decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), uses Ethereum smart contracts.
In October, Aragon announced its latest Aragon Network vote, where Aragon (ANT) token holders were able to cast their votes on a variety of proposals, including changes to Ethereum’s mining algorithm. The proposal states:
“ANT holders who vote ‘yes’ on this proposal oppose Ethereum changing its proof-of-work mining algorithm before the switch to proof-of-stake as part of the Ethereum 2.0 roll-out, unless such change is intended as an ‘emergency fix’ to a fatal flaw in the current mining algorithm. A ‘fatal flaw’ is defined here as a flaw that breaks the expected functionality of Ethereum.”
The vote passed with almost 860,000 tokens voting yes on the proposal to oppose, while 390,000 voted no.
In a tweet on Nov. 3, Aragon One CTO Jorge Izquierdo said that the Aragon team will respect the community’s decision and take it seriously.
Ethereum’s Istanbul hard fork expected to break 680 smart contracts on Aragon
At the beginning of October, Izquierdo said that the Ethereum network’s Istanbul upgrade will break roughly 680 smart contracts on the Aragon platform. Izquierdo added that DAOs on Aragon will no longer be able to receive Ether (ETH) from one another, stating, “The issue we’re going to have hasn’t been deemed important enough for this hard fork not to happen, which from our point of view is unfortunate but it’s a hard balance we understand.”
