There is a new release of the official merit miner 0.5 that brings some improvements in terms of stability, usability and maybe even some extra performance in some cases (Nvidia GPU miner). The interface of the new miner is now color coded, so it is easier to read, it also seems to be more stable on mining rigs with slower CPUs, though we are still seeing occasional crashes (we have a solution for that below). Performance wise we are seeing a slight improvement on mining rigs with mid-range and high-end processors (Pentium and iX), on slower Celerons there is not much of a difference in terms of hashrate compared to previous versions. Currently the merit miner 0.5 is available only for Windows, and you also have the alternative in the form of zjazz Merit CUDA miner (closed source with 2% dev fee), also only available for Windows. Linux users can download and use the previous release 0.4 for now and since both miners are only for Nvidia GPUs, AMD GPU miners will need to wait a bit more for a miner to be available for them (currently in the works). Below is an example batch (BAT) file for using the miner:

:loop
start merit-minerd-0.5.exe --url stratum+tcp://mine.icemining.ca:3333 --address MAxoXFtCLBscARXLUoKhKnT96aL8BYNh2m --gpu 0 1 2 3 4 5 --cores 0
wmic process where name="merit-minerd-0.5.exe" CALL setpriority 16384
timeout /t 1800
taskkill /f /im merit-minerd-0.5.exe
goto loop

We have introduced the Merit (MRT) project a couple of days ago as a still under the radar interesting crypto currency that you can mine, but it seems now that the cat is finally out of the bag with an official announcement thread getting posted today on Bitcointalk. There is still time before a large number of users get in as the project is still invite only, so you need to get an invite in order to register and have your wallet unlocked and the good news is that we still have a few invites left to share. We have a limited number of invites available to give away, so please do not waste them, we are going to send invites as soon as possible on a first-come, first-served basis. Sending multiple invite requests will not get you accepted faster, in fact will have the opposite effect!

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