Archive for the ‘Crypto News’ Category

GPU Miner for Heavycoin is Possible and is Being Worked On

14, Mar 2014

heavycoin-crypto-cyrrency

Heavycoin (HVC) is a recently launched crypto coin that can be mined only with the CPU, but apparently it is not impossible for a GPU miner to be created for it as well like with many other coins that started as CPU mining only. The key of the coin being “CPU only” is the use of multiple crypto algorithms – SHA-256, Keccak-512, Grøestl-512, BLAKE-512. But if you port all of them on the GPU you can achieve considerable speedup than what is possible with the CPU only mining, however for the moment there is no GPU miner available for HVC. The author of CudaMiner has reported some success already, note what he has posted in the bitcointalk forum about his work on a GPU miner for HVC (not CudaMiner, but a separate project):

we’ve accelerated 4 out of 5 hashing algos for HVC, but the last one (Groestl) is causing us a bit of trouble. Our first port is actually slower than the CPU – at least on my system.

Running Groestl on CPU and the rest on GPU I am getting an 800% performance boost vs. running the CPU alone.
Multiple CPU threads can even share a GPU ;)

Note that overall HVC is *not* CPU-only. They really need to change their advertising, and change it quickly. Whatever they did to SHA256 to turn it into a “GPU and ASIC resistant” HEFTY1 algorithm – it didn’t work as they intended.

Christian

Doubled Rewards for Litecoin Mining, LTC Cloud Mining Coming Soon, Bitcoin Cloud Mining Preorders as new Features on CEX

14, Mar 2014

litecoin-double-cex

It seems to be official now after digging a bit around the CexIO website we found some information that “LTC Cloud mining is coming soon” and adding the Litecoin mining pool at Ghash.io is apparently only the first step. The currently running promotion for doubled rewards for Litecoin mining for a week in the new LTC pool is apparently a good trick to attract a lot of user attention and after this week ends the service will most likely start offering LTC cloud mining and trading to go along with the already available BTC cloud mining and trading functionality. And apparently things are already working pretty well with the current pool speed of the Litecoin mining pool at 5.76 GHS and growing as more and more people are joining in. The 100% extra profitability promised over the standard LTC mined is an offer that is not easy to pass at the moment with the not so high profitability of other alternative cryptos, so the news is spreading pretty fast.

The CexIO account Balance page already shows some new things such as the FHM and FHA balance that apparently stands for future mining contracts. 1 FHA and 1 FHM stands for futures contract for 1 GHS that will start mining for you on 26th of April and May respectively with both already traded on the website’s exchange. The purchase of future hashrate at a much lower price of 0.00399999 BTC per FHA or 0.00399999 BTC per FHM. The total FHA (April) is 1000000 GHS (1000 THS) and the total FHM (May) on the exchange is 900000 meaning that apparently there are 900000 GHS (900 THS) more that will be added at CexIO and you can pre-order now. It is very much like pre-ordering a BTC ASIC, but with an exact date for delivery and easier to calculate the break even in time. This however does not mean that these future cloud mining hashrate contracts will be profitable as there are many variables to take into account as well as with pre-orders for ASIC hardware.

New Crypto Difficulty, Coin Profitability and Cloud Mining

13, Mar 2014

litecoin-hashrate-difficulty-latest-chart

You have probably noticed the recent jump in Litecoin difficulty up to 4,738 (up with more than 20%) and the most recent difficulty adjustment to 4,719 which is actually a slight decrease. This has allowed some alternative crypto currencies to again become attractive alternative with better profitability than directly mining for LTC, so this may help keep Litecoin from new serious jumps in terms of difficulty for a little longer. This is however not certain as Gridseed is apparently shipping already serious quantities of their Scrypt-capable ASIC devices and if they are all used for LTC mining the difficulty may skyrocket soon again.

On the Bitcoin front there was just another increase in difficulty, this time it was surprisingly small compared to previous difficulty increases. The new BTC network difficulty is 4,250,217,920 up with just about 11.39% from the previous one, while the previous few increases were all with about 20%. This is actually good news for people that have ASIC devices that still need to earn the investment in purchasing them.

And a quick look on what is going on with the cloud mining prices after the new difficulty for LTC and BTC. It seems that with Gridseed ASIC devices hitting the market the LTC prices for KHS of cloud mining are starting to get lower and cloud mining Litecoin is getting even more atractive than investing in BTC cloud mining hashrate. Below you can find the current prices for BTC and LTC cloud mining hashrate at some of the bigger services offering them.

Bitcoin cloud mining hasrate prices:
– PB Mining – 0.0083 BTC per 1 GHS
– Bit Minng – 0.012 BTC per 1 GHS
– CexIO – 0.0157 BTC per 1 GHS

Litecoin cloud mining hasrate prices:
– MarketsCX – 0.0295 LTC per 1 KHS
– Bit Minng – 0.055 LTC per 1 KHS
– ScryptCC – 0.0576 LTC per 1 KHS


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