Bitcoin price cryptocurrency
Bitcoin price remains stable as Roger Ver battles OKCoin and 55-year-old computer mines bitcoin IBTimes UK

The price of bitcoin dipped by around $3 over the last 24 hours, but subsequently bounced back to its starting point of $238.

Litecoin, often referred to as the silver to bitcoin's gold, experienced similar stability, shifting by around 0.25% since yesterday.

Roger Ver battles OKCoin over bitcoin.com domain

The domain name bitcoin.com is at the centre of a row between "Bitcoin Jesus" Roger Ver and Chinese exchange OKCoin.

A deal between Ver and OKCoin was made in 2014, which allowed OKCoin to redesign the site in exchange for sharing revenue with Ver.

OKCoin released a statement to say that it was no longer in control of the domain due to a "contractual conflict".

In response, Ver tweeted a link to a file that he claims can prove that OKCoin committed forgery.

The bitcoin.com domain currently redirects to popular bitcoin wallet service Blockchain.info.

Mining bitcoin with punch cards

A computer enthusiast has coded a program onto a 55-year-old computer capable of mining bitcoin, however it would take billions of years to mine a single bitcoin.

The IBM Model 1401 mainframe was used by Ken Shirriff in order to implement the SHA-256 hash algorithm that underlies bitcoin and the blockchain.

bitcoin mining punchcard IBM
The card deck used to compute hashes on the IBM 1401 mainframe Ken Shirriff

"I implemented the Bitcoin hash algorithm in assembly code for the IBM 1401 and tested it on a working vintage mainframe," Shirriff said in a blogpost. "It turns out that this computer could mine, but so slowly it would take more than the lifetime of the universe to successfully mine a block.

"While modern hardware can compute billions of hashes per second, the 1401 takes 80 seconds to compute a single hash. This illustrates the improvement of computer performance in the past decades, most famously described by Moore's Law."

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