Archive for the ‘Crypto Coins’ Category

talkether-mining-pool

Talkether is Ethereum’s first pool with a decentralized mining process according to the creators of the project. It is supposed to help secure the Ethereum network by decentralizing it more and also to help miners have higher mining rewards compared to other pools due to higher mining efficiency. The pool has a built-in failover since miners set their user id in the extradata of each block even in the improbable case of a server downtime each miner of a block (identified by the extradata in the block) will get full block reward.

During the closed alpha test of the pool that has finished recently, miners are reported to have experienced up to 20% higher rewards compared to the pools they used before. This is because there are no mining time losses for getting the work from the pool since each miner of the Talkether pool gets its work from his local node. The Talkether Ethereum mining pool is now open for registrations for everyone interested in trying it out, but do have in mind that it is still in beta with zero fees until the beta phase is over.

Like every other mining pool Talkether’s pool reduces the variance of the mining rewards of the pool miners. But instead of polling the work from a poolserver like in traditional pools, miners of the pool fetch the current work from their local node (you need the Geth client installed). A small java tool adjusts the block’s difficulty, sends mined share blocks over a secured connection to the Talkether share server and publishes all blocks on local node of the miners as well. The share server takes the share blocks, validates and saves them in the database. As all pool miners are mining in the Talkether’s pool etherbase, the high secured payout server manages payouts with the common PPLNS scheme.

For more details about the Talkether Ethereum mining pool and to try it out yourself…

digibyte-logo

The alternative crypto currency DigiByte (DGB) has shown a temporary peak in interest with trading on exchanges that literally skyrocketed many times over other coins that are more popular, but again this was only a temporary peak in interest and thus in the price of the coin. The interesting thing about DigiByte is that it uses five independent mining algorithms to process transactions over the network with each algorithm accounts for about 20% of all blocks discovered on the network. This allows for greater decentralization as currently three of the five DigiByte algorithms are ASIC resistant and much better for GPU miners. The best GPU algorithms to mine on are Skein, Groestl and Qubit and you can also mine Scrypt and SHA-256 with an ASIC if you already have one. The DGB coin is traded on some of the large altcoin exchanges such as Cryptsy and Bittrex among others, so if you are looking for something new to try on you might give DigiByte a go though in the next few days we are probably going to see it get back to the previous price levels.

For more information about the alternatice crypto currency DigiByte (DGB)…

ethereum-wallet

Finally there is work being done on an official GUI wallet for Ethereum that is curiously hosted in the Ethereum Mist Dapp Browser GitHub repository. Do note that this is a beta release that although functional could have some issues and is some advanced functionality is still not implemented, but the idea in this release is to get user feedback and to find any bugs. This is an official Ethereum GUI wallet that currently works along a Geth client as a backend, but should also be compatible with the Eth as well. The Mac and Windows 64-bit releases come bundled with Geth node and if you are not using it already it will need to synchronize the blockchain at the first start, otherwise it should tap to the already downloaded blockchain (already over 1.7 GB size) and work with any wallets available (backing the keys first is recommended). For other binary releases you would need to have the Geth (or Eth) client already running and then launch the Wallet GUI in order for it to work. Again, since this is a beta software it is best if you try it out on a system where you do not have a working Ethereum client installed in order to avoid any possible issues.

Another interesting development around Ethereum lately is apparently the start of adoption of Stratum support, there is the Stratum-Proxy for Ethereum project supported by Dwarfpool as well as the news that EthPool is working on a stratum enabled fork of Ethminer called qtminer that will be supported on their mining pool, but may get adopted by other pools. The current getwork implementation by Ethereum is not very practical and effective as compared to the Stratum implementation that is currently the standard for communication between pools and miners.

To download an test the new official Ethereum GUI Wallet 0.3.2 (Beta 2)…


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