Archive for the ‘Crypto Coins’ Category

Some More Merit (MRT) Invites Available, Start Mining Now

17, Sep 2018

Some more invites are available for the invite-only Merit project that we have introduced a while ago, so if you are interested in it and want to give it a try mining or using, then feel free to apply using the link below. Merit (MRT) coins can still only be mined with Nvidia GPUs, though AMD miner is in the works for a while now, there is already a third-parity Merit CUDA miner available with more options that you can try as well. Merit has its own trading market (MRT-BTC) with escrow that works fast and is really reliable, so you can buy and sell coins on the market. Since it is invite only and invites need to be mined and it is not yet listed on any major exchange, Merit is still kind of under the radar, but the last few weeks there has been a significant growth with increased interest and more people joining the project. 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 of not getting you invited at all!

– Click here to get your invite and register a wallet at Merit in order to be able to try it out…

Bitcoin Interest (BCI) and the New ProgPoW Mining Algorithm

15, Sep 2018

A few days ago the Bitcoin Interest (BCI) fork of Bitcoin has successfully switched to the ProgPoW algorithm, becoming the first crypto coin to actually utilize this new algorithm. ProgPoW is a proof-of-work algorithm designed to close the efficiency gap available to specialized ASICs. It utilizes almost all parts of commodity hardware (GPUs), and comes pre-tuned for the most common GPU hardware utilized in the Ethereum network. The design goal of ProgPoW is to have the algorithm’s requirements match what is available on commodity GPUs, so if the algorithm were to be implemented on a custom ASIC hardware there should be little opportunity for efficiency gains compared to a commodity GPU. This all means that in theory the ProgPoW algorithm will not see ASIC mining hardware, due to no opportunity to get much faster speeds compared to what a GPU is capable of delivering. This essentially means that ProgPoW should in theory be a really ASIC-resistant proof of work algorithm…

If you are interested in more details you can check the official BCI website, and miners would most likely be interested in the mining software, pools and a Bitcoin Interest mining calculator in order to see what is the current mining profitability of your GPU rigs. Here you can also find a BCI Block Explorer to see how are things progressing with the Bitcoin Interest blockchain. You might also be interested in the Bitcoin Interest GitHub repository for the official wallets, miners and so on.

BCI ProgPoW Miners:
– Nvdia ProgPoW miner for Windows
– AMD ProgPoW miner for Windows
– ProgPoW miners for Linux

BCI Mining Pools:
– LuckyPool
– AltPool
– Suprnova
– CoinBlockers
– ProgPool
– NibiruPool
– BasementPool

BCI Exchanges:
– HitBTC
– Stex

BitCash (BITC), a New Interesting Under The Radar Crypto Project

14, Sep 2018

BitCash (BITC) is a new crypto project being described as a solution that combines the power of blockchain with the features of banking to create the world’s most usable cryptocurrency and one that is easy to be used by regular people. It combines the advantages of cryptocurrency (speed, privacy, decentralization, low fees) with traditional fiat banking systems (transaction records, account names, electronic statements, accounting software integration), making BitCash an interesting project to keep an eye on. Since you can also mine BITC, if you are looking for new interesting coins to mine that are new and still under the radar. then BitCash is once more interesting find. BitCash (BITC) uses the same proof of work mining algorithm as Merit (MRT) that we have recently talked about, however the Cuckoo cycle algorithm in BitCash is using an Edgebit value of 27 and not 26 like for Merit. As a result you need a specific miner for BitCash (BITC) and get lower hashrate due to the difference in parameters and the official Merit miner will not work, though there is a third-parity miner already available that supports both coins, but more for that in a minute. Some good places to trade the coin include Citex, Stex, TOKOK, Crex and Graviex.

Although BitCash (BITC) uses the same mining algorithm as Merit (MRT), the general idea and the implementation of the project is quite different, so it is not just a simple fork. BitCash has a maximum coin supply of 100,000,000 BITC, the block time is 1 minute and block reward is 21.5 BITC in total, however there is a 9.7% premine and an ongoing 10% from the block reward going to the developers, so the actual block reward that goes to miners is 19.35 BITC per block. There is no proof of stake or growth score, so the coin can be pretty much only mined and traded, though there is no official or third-parity exchange supporting it for the moment (the project is still just a couple of days old and ecosystem development is still going on). If you are interested in buying or selling some BITC coins you can currently do so on the official Discord channel of the project.

If you have already mined Merit (MRT), then you will be familiar with the official miner for BitCash (BITC). It is essentially the same software with a slight modifications and it works only on Nvidia GPUs as there is currently no Cuckoo cycle miner for AMD GPUs available, you need to use this miner (or another compatible one) in order to mine BitCash. The bitcash-minerd will produce a bout half the hashrate that the merit-minerd manages to get you due to the different Edgebit parameter, so do not be alarmed when you see lower hashrate, it is normal. The miner is CPU dependent, so on mining rigs with slower processors the hashrate will be lower than on rigs with faster processors and there could be some stability issues as well, so you might want to stick to the example batch (BAT) file to run the miner just like you would with the official Merit miner (for 6 GPU mining rigs):

:loop
start bitcash-minerd.exe --url stratum+tcp://bitcash.luckypool.io:5777 --address 15v53ZR4YbU86n6oQV2JgMfrBaRMNQ6oQZyQwsuNNgBLCqSJWAc --gpu 0 1 2 3 4 5 --cores 0
wmic process where name="bitcash-minerd.exe" CALL setpriority 16384
timeout /t 1800
taskkill /f /im bitcash-minerd.exe
goto loop

You can download the official bitcash-minerd.exe miner for Windows here, there is a version available for Linux in the form of Ubuntu 18.04 and Ubuntu 16.04. Do note that the miner requires an Nvidia GPU with at least 4GB of video memory and you need up to date video drivers installed with support for the latest CUDA versions.

Here is a list of the currently available mining pools for BitCash and it is best if you mine on one of them, as solo mining even with GPU may soon be pointless, like CPU mining already is:

– https://bitcash.luckypool.io/pool/BITC/
– http://bitc.ginasismining.com/pool/BITC/
– http://bitc.youpool.io:3001/pool/BITC/
– http://premierpool.club:3456/pool/BITC/

Today zjazz has released an update to his zjazz cuda miner for the Cuckoo cycle algorithm adding support for BitCash (BITC) along the already available Merit (MRT) support in the software. It is a closed source miner available with binaries for both Windows and Linux that offers more options to try and tweak performance on mining rigs with both slower or faster CPUs, though this comes at a cost of 2% developer fee. Do note that the miner is still an early version and work in progress and may have some issues, though it does seem to handle better than the official miner on systems with slower processors stability wise.

– If you are interested in the BitCash (BITC) project already and want to get into it…


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