The Bitcoin network is run entirely through mining. Mining is the process by which computers solve algorithms, and when they find a block they get the block reward of 25 Bitcoins (worth $15,500 currently). Usually miners pool together their resources and receive shares of the block reward proportional to their mining power, since when mining alone it's extremely rare to find a block even if you own hundreds of thousands of dollars of mining equipment. When a block is found all transactions included in that block are confirmed. After receiving Bitcoin you cannot send it anywhere until it is confirmed at least once, so mining is essential for the Bitcoin network to keep running. On average there is 1 block found every 10 minutes, so it takes on average 10 minutes for a transaction to become confirmed. Confirmation time can vary wildly though, from less than a minute to several hours.

Bitcoin was created in 2008 by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto. It is uncertain whether Satoshi was an actual person or a pseudonym for a group of people, and the true identity of Satoshi is unknown to this day. Satoshi wrote a famous paper describing the Bitcoin protocol ( https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf ) and then released Bitcoin's source in January 2009. Bitcoin began with the genesis block which Satoshi mined himself. After that point Bitcoin began to slowly spread, and by October 2009 the first Bitcoin exchange opened. A Bitcoin exchange is a place where you can buy/sell Bitcoin with fiat. Initially you could buy over 1300 Bitcoins for $1. The price of Bitcoin steadily increased as its use became more widespread, and currently each Bitcoin is worth $620. A famous story from the early days of Bitcoin is that someone bought a $25 pizza for 10,000 Bitcoins. The Bitcoins used to buy that single pizza are worth over $6 million today. Many early adopters of Bitcoin became millionaires, which undoubtedly increased Bitcoin's popularity further.

Silk Road is an online marketplace which launched in February 2011 and is designed to be completely anonymous. Just about every drug in existence is available on Silk Road, including Heroin, Cocaine, Methamphetamine, pharmaceuticals, and Cannabis. The only way to access Silk Road is through Tor, which is a browser that makes it nearly impossible to trace IP addresses. Bitcoin is the sole payment method used on Silk Road, since with Bitcoin you can send money worldwide near instantly and anonymously. Compare this to credit cards or almost any other payment method, where your personal information is needed to complete a transaction. Also Bitcoin payments can't be reversed, unlike credit cards.

CoinsHost team is glad to announce that we have installed and tested the new DDoS migitation solution capable of handling attacks that scale up to 200 Gbps. In fact attacks of this size still are a very rare occurence (less than 0.5% of all attacks according to our statistics), whereas an average attack size and duration keep growing on a monthy basis. Be sure that when your websites or servers are hosted with CoinsHost, we will be able to mitigate against any attack that targets your web properties or infrastructure, no matter how big the size of attack actually is.

A serious vulnerability in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic software library that can lead to compromising of the protected data and/or private keys has been announced recently. All OpenSSL versions from 1.0.1 through 1.0.1f (inclusive) are vulnerable. If OpenSSL is installed on your server, it is strongly recommended to update it to a fixed version 1.0.1g or newer.

CoinsHost has started to accept the crypto-currency Litecoin (LTC) as a digital form of payment for all products and services that it offers. Now you can pay for cloud web hosting, dedicated servers, VPS, DDoS protection, colocation, CDN and BitTorrent Sync file storage with one more P2P decentralized currency based on encryption - Litecoin.

CoinsHost team are glad to announce that our site is open for orders now. You can buy Dedicated Servers Hosting, Cloud VPS Hosting, DDoS protection, Colocation Hosting, CDN and other products and services with Bitcoin (BTC) and Nextcoin (NXT) in addition to a wide range traditional payment methods such as Paypal, Credit Cards etc.

Enter code COINSHOST on checkout to save 10% on all your purchases above 100 CHF! This offer is available through Feb, 20.