Gigarefurb Refurbished Laptops News

Almost a year after it was shown off at Computex 2017, the full-copper version of Cryorig’s C7 heatsink has been officially announced. The C7 is currently Cryorig’s smallest low-profile heatsink. The heatsink’s design places its entire structure directly over its footprint. Because no parts of it overhang components on the motherboard, the C7 is nearly as universally compatible as Intel’s stock cooler.

The new C7 Cu is identical in form to the regular C7. The only difference is in the material of its heatsink. As the its name implies, the C7 Cu’s heatsink is constructed entirely from uncoated copper, which is a better conductor than aluminum. Cryorig said the new material improves the C7’s performance by 15%. What this translates to is a rated TDP of 115W, 15W more than the regular C7’s 100W, and a weight of 675g, nearly double that of the regular C7’s 357g.

The regular C7 predates the AM4 socket used by AMD’s Ryzen processors, so it needs a separate compatibility kit to work those processors. The new C7 Cu is compatible with AM4 by default. The C7 Cu will be available starting June for $50.

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Alexander Nix, former Cambridge Analytica CEOCambridge Analytica, SCL Group‘s American division and the company accused of harvesting the data of up to 87 million Facebook users, was working on launching its own Initial Coin Offering (ICO), according to a New York Times report. An ICO allows certain cryptocurrency projects to raise funds similarly to a stock Initial Public Offering (IPO), but with significantly fewer regulations.

Documents and emails obtained by the NYT showed that Cambridge Analytica’s psychological profiles on Facebook users also helped launch another cryptocurrency, called Dragon Coin, which seems to have ties to a famous gangster in Macau, going by the nickname “Broken Tooth.” Dragon Coin was supposed to make it easier for people to get their money in casinos from Macau, an island that’s part of China.

Cambridge Analytica was hoping that the funds raised through its own ICO would help the company build a system that would allow users to store and sell their personal digital data to advertisers, according to Brittany Kaiser, a former Cambridge Analytica employee.

The project was overseen by Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix, who was forced out of the company in March after he was caught bragging in a recording about the company’s political strategies designed to entrap opponents. Once he left the company, the cryptocurrency project, which was still in the early development phase, was put on hold.

When it started working on coin offerings last year, Cambridge Analytica was boasting to investors that it was able to use its psychographic profiles to target new investors for the token sale. This was before both Google and Facebook banned cryptocurrency ads from their platforms, because most of the ads were using “misleading or deceptive promotional practices.”

Jill Carlson, a consultant for cryptocurrency companies, said she attended a meeting in which Cambridge Analytica employees were bragging about helping Donald Trump win the election and also about using similar strategies in Mexico to help certain Mexican politicians.

Carlson said that this pitch from Cambridge Analytica seemed contrary to the openness and transparency of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin:

The way that Cambridge Analytica was talking about it, they were viewing it as a means of being able to basically inflict government control and private corporate control over individuals, which just takes the whole initial premise of this technology and turns it on its head in this very dystopian way.

Although Alex Tayler, Cambridge Analytica’s Chief Data Officer, was overseeing the company’s cryptocurrency’s project along with Nix, he also stepped down from the role of acting CEO. Julian Wheatland, the chairman of the SCL Group, Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, will take over as CEO, but it’s not clear whether or not the cryptocurrency project will be resumed.

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Lian Li’s latest case offering, the PC-O11 Dynamic, is a gorgeous chassis with large tempered glass panels, outstanding water cooling support, and a surprisingly reasonable price tag of $99.

Exterior

Sharp eyed readers will remember that the Lian Li PC-O11 Dynamic was awarded our “Best Value PC Case” award at CES 2018 earlier this year. This chassis, designed in collaboration with renowned extreme-overclocker Roman “Der8auer” Hartung, features steel-and-tempered-glass construction, with a brushed-aluminum accent panel. The chassis measures 450 x 275 x 450mm (L x W x H), is painted black inside and out, and weighs in at just under 22lbs.

The top of the chassis is flat and, with the exception of a 5 by 15-inch row of ventilation slots, is featureless. There are no handles, buttons, slots or ports on the top if the PC-O11 Dynamic. The aforementioned slotted vents span almost the entire length of the left-hand side of the chassis, front to back.

The right-hand side of the front of the chassis is covered by a brushed aluminum panel that is home to two USB 3.0 ports, microphone and headphone jacks, a power button, and a single USB Type-C port. The majority of the front of the case is covered by a 420 x 220 x 4mm tinted tempered glass panel. 

The fact that this chassis is equipped with a full-cover tempered glass side panel isn’t anything special, many cases these days have one or more glass panels. But It’s the rather ingenious way the tempered glass panels are attached to the case that make this chassis stand out. The tempered glass panels can only be detached once the top panel has been removed. This clever design minimizes the possibility of dropping a glass panel during installation or maintenance, and the lack of traditional thumbscrew fasteners gives the PC-O11 Dynamic a sleek and stylish look.

Those of you concerned about airflow need only to look at the panel on the opposite side of the case, where you’ll find slotted vents, identical to those on the top panel, covering both the front and back of the stamped-steel panel. Just as with the glass panels, the top panel has to be removed in order to gain access for cleaning and maintenance.

The rear of the chassis is home to eight expansion card slots, a motherboard I/O area in the center, a mounting location for a bottom-mounted PSU, as we as an opening for two 3.5″ hard drives (or a secondary power supply). The bottom of the case has three filter-covered mounting locations for 120mm fans, as well as four large, rubber-lined plastic feet.

The PC-O11 Dynamic features a solid fan filtration system. Every intake fan mounting location in this chassis is equipped with a large washable magnetic filter. Overall, these filters do a good job preventing dirt and dust particles from entering your system.

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Bitcoin
Ten years ago, there was just Bitcoin, the original blockchain-based cryptocurrency. Today, there are currently over 1,500 cryptocurrencies. Initially, most of the new coins tried to clone Bitcoin and just change how the Proof of Work (PoW) algorithm worked. Since then, many new coins have tried to outgrow Bitcoin and provide a new type of technology, which is how we ended up with multiple types of digital coins.

Transaction Coins

Of course, the most important transaction type coin is Bitcoin. Bitcoin was created by an anonymous author (or group of authors) using the alias “Satoshi Nakamoto,” with the goal of enabling people to do fast transactions from anywhere in the world with low fees and without any third-party manipulation.

Although Bitcoin was the original “cryptocurrency,” lately more people have started calling it a “store of value,” and we’ve seen some major companies stop supporting it because the fees were getting too expensive. Plus, Bitcoin still hasn’t solved the volatility issues, which means it’s difficult for businesses to work with it unless they use a third-party service to automatically convert Bitcoin into USD when customers purchase their products.

Stellar
Bitcoin has implemented some new features such as SegWit and the Lightning Network, which allows exchanges or companies to support “off-chain” (outside of the blockchain) transactions that have low or almost zero fees. However, for now adoption is still slow, and it remains to be seen what impact Segwit and Lightning Network will have on future Bitcoin transactions.

New coins that are focused on delivering a high number of transactions per second and low fees have appeared in the past few years. The coins with the highest number of transactions include cryptocurrencies such as Ripple, Stellar, IOTA, Nano, NEM, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, and potentially even Ethereum.

Privacy Coins

Many people have misunderstood Bitcoin’s privacy features, assuming that Bitcoin payments were by default anonymous. However, that’s not quite true. At most, Bitcoin wallet addresses and transactions are pseudonymous in the same way you can create a Twitter account that uses a random nickname instead of your real name and you don’t feed it your real name anywhere in the account. However, Twitter will still know your IP address and anyone you communicate with on the platform, as will everyone else (because Twitter is public).

Monero
Similarly, all of your transactions are done on the public ledger/blockchain and anyone who decides to inspect your transactions can see from who you purchased products or to whom you paid money. The only way to have truly anonymous or private transactions is to use Tor for everything and to avoid tying any of those transactions to your real name, location, and so on, just as you would do if you wanted to create a truly anonymous Twitter account.

Some cryptocurrencies solve this issue in different ways (although some of them can also integrate with Tor). One of the most popular and trustworthy is Monero, which is generally regarded as “untraceable.” However, there are still ways in which you can err and reveal your identity, if you’re not careful how you do your transactions.

Zcash is another privacy-focused cryptocurrency that uses a brand-new cryptography technique called “zero knowledge proofs” to create anonymous transactions. However, these transactions are not enabled by default, because they use too many computational resources. The default transactions are just as transparent to the network as Bitcoin transactions are. The project’s team has promised to improve the performance of anonymous transactions significantly in the future.

Other lesser known privacy coins include DASH, Verge, PIVX, ByteCoin, Komodo, DeepOnion, etc.

Programmable Blockchains

Ethereum is the most popular “programmable blockchain” platform that allows developers to build other apps, cryptocurrencies, or “smart contracts” (automated scripts that enforce a contract between two or more parties) on top of it.

Qtum
Smart contracts promise to be a revolution in the finance industry, but also in other industries such as healthcare, real estate, or any industry that might benefit from the radical transparency and accuracy provided by smart contracts.

Ethereum also supports the creation of “tokens,” which are a representation of certain assets on a blockchain. The tokens can represent other cryptocurrencies, commodities, or reward/loyalty points. Tokens are then distributed to the public through Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), which are somewhat similar to companies offering an Initial Public Offering (IPO) when they go on the public stock market.

Developers can also create “decentralized applications” on programmable blockchains, such as identity and reputation systems, voting and governance platforms, financial apps, decentralized file storage apps, messaging apps, and more.

Some of the most popular programmable blockchain cryptocurrencies, besides Ethereum, include Cardano, EOS, Lisk, NEM, Neo, Qtum, etc

Store Of Value/Stablecoins

As we already mentioned, some people consider Bitcoin a transaction cryptocurrency, whereas others see it as more of a store-of-value crypto-asset or as “digital gold.” Bitcoin is considered a store of value because all of the other (over 1,500) cryptocurrencies seem to rise or fall in value based on how well Bitcoin does. If Bitcoin has a few good months, then so will the other cryptocurrencies. If Bitcoin crashes, then so do the other coins.

TrueUSD
However, most other coins tend to crash much harder than Bitcoin does, because some people convert money into USD, while others prefer to keep them in Bitcoins. These people keep their money in Bitcoin either because they believe Bitcoin will rise again even more in the future, or because converting into USD means they have to pay taxes for that year, as they’re essentially “taking profits.” This is what keeps Bitcoin’s value relatively high when the whole cryptocurrency market sees a decline.

When the market dips, though, Bitcoin does tend to lose much of its value, which is why some cryptocurrency investors convert to “stablecoins.” A stablecoin is a coin that is a price-stable cryptocurrency, with its value tied to a fiat currency such as the U.S. dollar.

When people buy and sell stablecoins, the value will self-correct to be as close as possible to the value of USD (within 3%-7%). Therefore, even if the cryptocurrency market declines by 70%, those who have put their money into stablecoins before the decline will not lose nearly as much in value as everyone else.

The most popular stablecoin in the past few years has been Tether. However, Tether is also highly controversial right now, because the company behind it seems to continue to print Tether out of thin air without showing much evidence that they’re backing it with real USD, like they were supposed to do.

Alternatives to Tether include MakerDAO’s Dai, TrueUSD, Basecoin, Bitshares’ BitUSD, Kowala’s kUSD, etc.

DGX
Another store of value cryptocurrency that’s somewhat similar to stablecoins is DigixDAO’s DGX token, which is backed by (real) gold instead of by fiat currencies. That means its value shouldn’t be quite as stable as the value of stablecoins, because fiat currencies are much more stable than goal in general. However, it should still be significantly more stable than Bitcoin or most other cryptocurrencies, as gold is still far less volatile than cryptocurrencies are.

At the time of this writing, the cryptocurrency market has suffered quite a beating from the sellers, as negative news about major exchange hacks and government regulations abound. However, unless this time really is different, then the market should rebound again, as it’s done plenty of times in the past decade. Then, we should be able to see even more types of coins and blockchain technologies emerge as developers continue to innovate.

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