Archive for the ‘Crypto Coins’ Category

Ethereum’s (ETH) Next Hardfork is Coming at the End of February

13, Feb 2019

The much anticipated Constantinople hardfork of Ethereum was initially planned for the middle of January, however a serious bug was discovered shortly before the time of the fork, so it was postponed. The new date for for Ethereum’s latest network hardfork system upgrade is around 27-28 February (end of the month) or more specifically at block number 7,280,000 (200,000 blocks later than the originally planed block). The hardfork will be in two parts, the first one will include all five EIPs (Ethereum Improvement Proposals) including the problematic EIP 1283, that was the reason to postpone the fork initially, and the second part will be used to remove the problematic EIP 1283. So after the Constantinople and Petersburg hardfork (the two parts we are talking about) the Ethereum network will have the following 4 EIPs active – 145, 1014, 1052 and 1234.

The improvements to the Ethereum network that the new hardfork will bring are numerous and they focus on improving salability, speed and efficiency of the blockchain. There is however a change that is also important to the economics of the Ethereum network and one that is especially important for miners. EIP 1234 is going to adjust the block reward, so after the fork miners will be getting just 2 ETH coins per block instead of the 3 ETH that they are getting at the moment. There isn’t much needed from you to do in order to be ready for the hardfork if you are using or mining Ether, just make sure you update any local wallet or client that you might be running. Also make sure to not make any transactions around the time of the hardfork in order to avoid any possible issues with delayed transactions and lost coins, though normally such problems are not very likely.

Grin Mainnet Launching Today, Are You Ready for Mining

15, Jan 2019

Grin is a new crypto project for creating a the private and lightweight mimblewimble blockchain that would provide electronic transactions for everyone without censorship or restrictions. The algorithm that Grin uses is Cuckoo Cycle with 1 minute block time, 60 GRIN block reward and no limit on coin supply or reward halving. There is not going to be any ICO, founders reward, pre-mine or masternodes available for this project, so people that do not like any of these should be Ok with this project. Miners for Grin are still currently being developed, although there are some already announced or available, though initially it could be a bit of a challenge to make things work with the right miner and pool. For instance the official MWGrinPool is currently not taking new registrations, though new pools should be available as alternatives. There are already a couple of options for pools on the Testnet where you can test the mining before the Mainnet launch like Spark Pool. Some good places to trade GRIN include CoinEgg, Gateio, HitBTC and Bittrex.

The official open-source Grin Miner software is currently only available for Linux and Mac OS X and it supports both CUDA and OpenCL mining. For miners looking for Windows miners there is the Grin Gold Miner (with 1% fee for the Grin Development Fund and 1% fee for further miner development), although it also works with Linux) that supports all AMD and NVIDIA 8GB cards (requires a GPU with 8GB VRAM!). Do note however that Nvdia RTX 8GB cards need Linux or Windows 7 due to memory addressing issues. RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti are fastest in terms of performance if you manage to make them work, OpenCL code for AMD cards is currently still being optimized. Cheaper slower Celeron CPUs are not recommended for many cards on the system (similar to Merit and BITC that also use the same algorithm for mining). Another alternative for Windows miners should be the GrinPro Miner that is not yet available for download and that will have 2% developer fee. This miner should work on AMD and Nvidia GPUs with 8GB VRAM, although it promises upcoming support for 6GB VRAM cards as well, so that could be interesting for some users.

Unfortunately zjazz, who was pretty active in miner development for Cuckoo Cycle support for Merit and BITC hasn’t updated his miner for a while and will probably not be supporting Grin mining at least for the moment. The latest version of Bminer that was just made available however also comes with experimental support for mining Grin, so you might want to check it out as well. Do note that it is a closed source miner with 2% developer fee, so have that in mind as well when checking out different miners for Grin. The latest version of the closed source miner NBMiner has also just added support for the Cuckaroo algorithm used by Grin (both Windows and Linux), so you can give it a try as well (Nvidia only).

The Veil Project Has Launched, Mine it Using the X16RT Algorithm

2, Jan 2019

After a bit of a delay the official launch of the Veil Project happened earlier today and you can already mine VEIL coins if you are looking for something new and interesting to move your GPU mining rigs on to. Veil is the first Zerocoin-based cryptocurrency with always-on privacy thanks to combining Zerocoin and RingCT technologies to provide full-time privacy without compromise. Veil’s blockchain is secured via Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake, though initially only 50% of the coins (50 VEIL) are going to mining/staking and the rest is distributed among the founder, Veil Labs for ongoing research and development and Veil operations budget, funding operations activities such as core network and wallet development, project management, online user support, bounties, and  marketing. You can check the official Veil Project website for full details and additional information about the project.

The Proof-of- Work algorithm is X16RT, based on the X16R algorithm introduced by Ravencoin, but with modifications so it requires a new specific miner and such are already available for both AMD and Nvidia GPUs. Miners with Nvidia-based mining rigs can download and use the latest supminer 2.0 that supports X16RT algorithm and AMD miners can go for the latest WildRig Multi 0.15.0.8 mtp x16rt that has also added support for the X16RT algorithm with more miners probably going to follow soon enough with support for the new X16RT algorithm. If you are looking for a mining pool, you can currently go to the https://veil.suprnova.cc/ as the first pool to support VEIL with others probably following soon as well. The wallet currently does seem to have issues for some users, so do not be in a hurry to transfer your coins from the pool to a local wallet. Some exchanges to trade Veil coins include Citex, Crex and TXbit.


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