Bitmain targets Ethash after cryptonight failure + 7 new Bitcoin Lapps

Ethereum ASIC miners have been developed by Bitmain and are available for pre-order. The miner known as Antminer E3 will be the first ASIC miner compatible with Ethereum's Ethash proof of work. Recently Bitmain also released an ASIC for Monero's cryptonight proof of work, however in response the Monero community conducted a hard fork to maintain ASIC resistance. ASIC's are more efficient than GPU's for cryptocurrency mining, however they can result in centralisation as one or two dominant manufacturers like Bitmain control the market.

The lightning network has been the target of denial of service attacks from BitPico, claiming to be conducted for the purposes of stress testing the network and finding attack vectors. The nature of the attacks require the attacker to spend funds spamming the network with new payment channels. Only the attacker loses their funds. These attacks have been described by Andreas as "free testing".

7 new Lapps (lightning apps) have been developed by Blockstream.. This brings the total Lapps from Blockstream to 8, summarised below:

Nanopos — A simple point-of-sale system for fixed-price goods
WooCommerce Lightning Gateway — A comprehensive e-commerce application that integrates with stock-management and order-tracking systems
FileBazaar — A system for selling files such as documents, images, and videos
Lightning Publisher for WordPress — A patronage model for unlocking WordPress blog entries
Paypercall — A programmer’s toolkit for Lightning that enables micropayments for individual API calls
Ifpaytt — An extension of paypercall that allows web developers using IFTTT to request payments for service usage
Lightning Jukebox — A fun demo that reimagines a classic technology for the Lightning Network
Nanotip — The simple tip jar, rebuilt to issue Lightning Network invoices