Welcome to the NiceHash crypto news digest. Let's see what happened these last few days.

Bitcoin turns 14 years old!

This week, Bitcoin turned 14 years old! On January 3rd 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto mined the very first Bitcoin block, the Genesis Block.

The Genesis Block is special in many ways. Unlike all other blocks, the Block #0 does not link to any previous block, as none existed before it.

Additionally, in this block, the first 50 BTC were created, but they can never be spent. This is because the coinbase transaction was not added to the transactions' database. If Satoshi tried to spend these coins today, the transaction would get rejected by the blockchain nodes. No one knows if this was intentional or simply a bug.

Another curious fact about this block is that in its coinbase message, Satoshi wrote: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”. Satoshi has never explained the true meaning of this message, leaving many to speculate if this comment was targeted directly at banks and governments.

NVIDIA releases the new RTX 4070 Ti

On January 5th, NVIDIA released their new RTX 4070 Ti GPU for a price of 799 USD. This graphics card has identical specs as the previously announced RTX 4080 12GB, which was "unlaunched" after community backlash last year.

Surprisingly, when it comes to mining, we can expect this GPU to perform worse than its predecessor, the RTX 3070 Ti, on memory intensive algorithms like ETCHash and DaggerHashimoto. The reason behind the lower performance is the cut-down memory bus width of only 192-bits.

You can check the predicted hashrate for the RTX 4070 Ti in this blog article. We will be updating the values as more information becomes available.

AMD unveiled their new 3D V-Cache Ryzen 7000-series CPUs at CES

During their CES presentation, AMD has unveiled their new Ryzen 7000-series CPUs that will come with their latest 3D V-Cache technology.

The announced 7800X3D, 7900X3D, and 7950X3D retain the same boost clock speeds and core counts as their X-series counterparts, but feature significantly more L3 cache for improved performance in certain applications.

We had previously seen this technology play an important role in gaming and mining performance in the previous generation. You can check the astonishing difference in the RandomXMonero mining performance between the last gen Ryzen 7 5800X and Ryzen 7 5800X3D with our profitability calculator comparison feature.

With these new CPUs, we might see considerable mining efficiency improvements compared to the standard X models, and perhaps even a comeback of CPU mining popularity!

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