Archive for the ‘Crypto Coins’ Category

Mining Nervos (CKB) is Quickly Moving Away From GPUs to FPGA Miners

19, Nov 2019

Just a few days after the official launch of the Nervos (CKB) mainnet and GPU mining the Eaglesong algorithm may alterady become pointless with FPGAs apparently getting support for the algorithm. First was the information about FPGA support available for the EagleSong algorithm with bitstreams and miners available for Alveo U200 and Xilinx VCU1525 FPGAs. Now Hash Altcon has also announced support for Nervos CKB mining on their Blackminer F1 series of FPGAs with the CKB bitstream to be released soon. They state Eaglesong hashrate of 22 GH/S with power usage of 1020 Watts (1.1 GH/S for single GTX 1080 Ti with 200W of power usage), so definitely more efficient than GPUs. This is signaling the end of GPU mining for Nervos (CKB) and a move onto FPGA mining for sure. There was a pick in mining hashrate yesterday when first new of FPGA support broke out, though today it is lower, with Blackminers F1 joining the game in the next few days there will most likely be another spike in hashrate… depending on profitability of course. With the slow difficulty adjustment that Nervos (CKB) currently uses there may still be some more time left for GPU mining, though even at the moment profitability does not seem attractive at all.

YadaCoin is Yet Another Project That has Forked to RandomX

14, Nov 2019

It seems that another crypto project has moved to RandomX as a Proof of Work mining algorithm – YadaCoin. Yada is a blockchain social media protocol that uses YadaCoins for social interactions, and even though the project started in 2018 it seems to be slow in getting a lot of attention. We just recently discovered it thanks to the RandomX fork they had a few days ago and while we wanted to give it a try and mine some coins, unfortunately our efforts ended up in vain. We could not make the official Windows mining software to work (no pools yet, only solo mining), have not tried mining under Linux, though unfortunately there is not much information available to help… not even on the fork itself. It seems that unless you have been following the development from the start you might have trouble getting to understand how to make things work and that is never a good thing for a crypto project that wants to become mainstream, let alone one that wants to build a social media blockchain.

– If you like digging and trying things out, then you might give YadaCoin with RandomX mining a go…

ArQmA (ARQ) Has Forked to a New RandomARQ and Results Are Interesting

11, Nov 2019

We have already mentioned the plans of ArQmA (ARQ) to fork to a new RandomX-based algorithm called RandomARQ and that has happened a few days ago and we have tried CPU mining the new algorithm. Since it is based on RandomX we expected to see significant advantage for the latest AMD’s Ryzen CPUs like we’ve seen with RandomX and some other variants of the algorithm used by other projects. To our surprise however Intel’s multi-core processors are actually not that far behind in terms of performance (a few times slower like on RandomX). Of course Intel is still slower, but the actual difference is not as much as we’ve seen so far and that is definitely good news for miners that have some spare Intel CPUs that might be interested in mining something based on RandomX.

We have tested performance using the latest XMRig miner and SRBMiner-MULTI miner with the seond one still performing slower as we have seen with other RandomX algorithms compared to XMRig. With an AMD Ryzen 3600 using XMRig we are getting around 22.8 KH/s while on Intel Core i7 6850K CPU we get about 17 KH/s, both being 6 core – 12 thread processors though the AMD one is much newer product. With SRBMiner-Multi the results were 13.4 KH/s with the AMD and 7.8 KH/s for the Intel CPU, so you better stick to XMRig for mining ARQ for now and you might want to also test your Intel processor(s) as well for the RandomARQ algo. The not so good news however is that profit for a single CPU mining ArQmA (ARQ) is well nonexistent, unless you do not pay for electricity… 20 USD cents per day for the Intel and 30 for the AMD processors. These dayly earnings could probably just cover your electricity costs if you have cheap electricity at 10 USD cents per kilowatt.

– If you are still interested in the ArQmA (ARQ) crypto project and the RandomARQ algorithm…


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