Archive for the ‘Crypto Coins’ Category

The craze surrounding PascalCoin (PASC) continues, but aside from solo mining with a very high difficulty that is viable only for very large miners, users with less GPUs and significantly smaller hashrate can now use the first available PASC mining pool from Nanopool. Do note that the Pascalcoin mining pool does currently have some limitation such as the availability only of a 64-bit Windows miner and you need to use the specially modified miner for the pool. Also the minimum payout is 1 PASC with with block reward confirmation after 110 blocks and the pool uses PPLNS payout scheme where N is defined as all submitted shares during the last 3 hours.

Among the good things is the fact that you don’t really need to have a PascalCoin account to mine on the pool (you need to find a block yourself to get an account), instead you can directly mine to an exchange’s account such as Poloniex. You only need to make sure that aside from the exchange address that you will be given you also set the correct unique payment-ID or payload in order to be able to get your payments. It is interesting to note that all of the top miners in terms of hashrate are mining directly to Poloniex addresses, obviously with the idea to trade the mined coins and not keep them long term. This may as well mean that the current high exchange rate may not be able to keep up the selling pressure and as soon as the first pool payments hit it may start dropping, so be wary of that as well.

Here is an example command line for running the miner on Pasc.Nanopool.org:

PascalCoinMiner.exe -s pasc-eu1.nanopool.org:15555 -p 0 -d 0,1,2,3,4,5 -n 86646-64.ab4df757230f6366.480s

In the above example you the very important part is the one after the -n parameter, where first you set the account address (86646-64 is for Poloniex), then the second part after the point is the unique ID being generated from the exchange and after that you can set the worker name such as 480s in the example. The other parameters such as server address, the platform ID and device IDs that will be used for mining are pretty much the same as for the miner available for solo mining aside from setting the pool address of course.

If you are looking for a mining calculator for PASC you can check out the one provided by CryptoCompare here. Be careful with the estimates the calculator is giving you as by the time you actually mine some coins and have them confirmed (it could take a couple of hours) the numbers might be very different. Also make sure that you measure the power usage of your mining rig(s) as the algorithm used by PascalCoin can be more power hungry than what you were lately used in terms of power consumption by other popular crypto coins such as Ethereum or Zcash for example.

To check out the PascalCoin (PASC) mining pool now available from Nanopool…

PascalCoin (PASC) is not a brand new launched altcoin, it has been available for a while already, but the recent addition of the coin to the Poloniex exchange and the high trading volume has sparkled a lot of user interest in the coin. PascalCoin is interesting because of its design to work without a historical operations requirement (no need to download the complete blockchain), yet is still able to control double spending or check balance. PASC is not directly forked from another altcoin and that has its advantages and disadvantages and as a result it is also not very easy to understand how to use it by new users or even ones that already have some experience with other altcoins. This probably also is one of the reasons that there was not much interest in the coin prior to the recent listing on Poloniex, but now new people are rushing in to discover more about it and start mining the coin. You can currently trade Pascal (PASC) coins on TOKOK and qTrade crypto exchanges.

Currently PascalCoin (PASC) only supports solo mining, so you need to have a local running wallet and then run the GPU miner to connect tot he wallet (the latest miner is OpenCL-based), mining with CPU is pointless due to the low hashrate. With solo mining things rely more on the luck you have in the amount of blocks you can mine, but with the current hashrate you might expect to wait something like a day or even two with a 6x GPU mining rig using RX 470/480 video cards and the block reward is 100 coins. Hopefully a pool for mining PascalCoin (PASC) will soon be available as well making things more balanced, especially for people without that much GPU mining power available.

In order to solo mine with the latest PascalCoinMiner v0.2 you need to have a running wallet and then run the miner pointing at the IP address of the wallet running by default on port 4009 (using the -s command line parameter). If you are mining only on a single computer running the wallet you can use localhost, if you want to mine using multiple rigs on a single system running the wallet you will need to use the system’s local network IP address instead. With the -p command line parameter you set the GPU device platform to use (normally it should be 0 for most cases) and with -d you specify the video cards you want to use. The last parameter -n sets the miner name you want to use, below is an example:

PascalCoinMiner.exe -s localhost:4009 -p 0 -d 0,1,2,3,4,5 -n MYNAMEtestMiner

You can download the latest official PascalCoin Wallet Windows Binary from here…
You can download the latest official PascalCoin Miner v0.2 Windows Binary from here…

Monero (XMR) has been rising up lately in terms of price and user interest and lately it even started rivaling the total market capitalization of Litecoin (LTC) as well as Ripple’s (XRP). In fact XMR, LTC and XRP and currently pretty close in terms of market capitalization and are seriously fighting for the 3rd place among the top crypto currencies in terms of market cap. With Ripple not mineable it is up to Litecoin and Monero to fight for the miners’ interest and Monero is doing much better lately when compared to Litecoin (ASIC mineable). Even with the availability of the new Innosilicon A4 ASICs being available for a while the interest in mining Litecoin hasn’t picked up much.

Monero (XMR) is gaining more interest however and people are getting back to mining it and trading it even more with new big exchanges such as Kraken adding XMR trading pairs as a result of the huge boom in the exchange rate of the altcoin. If you are interested in mining Monero and it is a coin you are still not very familiar with, then you can check a website dedicated for benchmarks with different hardware and miners to see what works best and what you can expect from your hardware. Also feel free to submit your own benchmark results as well…

To take a look at the website with GPU & CPU Benchmarks for Monero Mining…


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