Archive for the ‘General Info’ Category

AuroraCoin A Week After the Start of the AirDrop

30, Mar 2014

auroracoin-market-price-weekly

It is already 5 days since AuroraCoin, the crypto currency that had the the idea of national distribution of premined coins to the population of Iceland, started distributing 31.8 AUR to Icelanders. The so called AirDrop requires people from Iceland to request their AUR coins by identifying with a National ID and the claim page is only available in Icelandic. There has been a lot of controversy regarding the idea behind the AuroraCoin, but initially it has helped the crypto currency to have a really high market cap and value, also because of the big number of premined coins that were not yet in circulation. Now, 5 days after the start of the AirDrop or the procedure for Icelanders to claim their AUR coins, the things may not look so bright when you look at the price of the crypro currency at the moment.

Out of the 50% that have been premined with the idea to be given away to Icelanders, so far about 755854 AUR coins are already in circulation through the AirDrop, or about 7.2% of a total 10,500,000 Airdrop coins in just 5 days. This is according to the official information available, though there is a lot of speculation going on weather people are in fact claiming their AUR coins or it is all a scam and somebody is dumping premined coins on the market. The fact that since the start of the AirDrop the price of AuroraCoin has gone down significantly instead of going up is not helping either. It could be all due to people claiming their coins dumping them immediately on exchanges to get Bitcoin or real cash for them – this can be expected if somebody gives you free cash. There is a spike in the volume of trades and mostly sell orders, so it is normal for the price to drop and it seems that the bottom of the price has been hit at around 0.003 BTC per AUR and it is starting to recover, though still far from the previous levels of 0.02 BTC per AUR before the start of the AirDrop or the even higher levels before that. We’ll see how things progress in the future as the AirDrop for AuroraCoin continues and more coins are supposedly distributed to people of Iceland as this is something that will show what is the potential for other “national” crypto currencies…

Using Raspberry Pi for Gridseed ASIC Mining Controller

30, Mar 2014

raspberry-pi-controller

We just got our Raspberry Pi and we are about to start testing the few already available mining images for the device that help you get started in using it for a Gridseed ASIC mining controller. You can of course start with a normal distribution and compile the miner yourself and set things up to run with the Raspberry Pi, however this requires some extra knowledge and time and not anybody can do it. On the other hand you have readily available images that you just need to write on and SD card and run them on the Raspberry Pi and supposedly you just need to configure the pool settings and you will be up and running in no time. Could it be that easy, or you should expect to have some troubles, we are going to find out soon enough. For now we’ll list the Gridseed optimized images that we could find available to use on Raspberry Pi, so you might want to give them a try as well…

Scripta is a Litecoin mining distribution for Raspberry Pi that provides a web interface for easier controlling, configuring and monitoring your mining devices. Originally it does not support Gridseed devices, but by replacing the supplied cgminer with a one supporting Gridseed ASICs you can easily make it work with Gridseed devices as well. In fact we suspect that most of the other images available below are based on Scripta based on some screenshots we’ve seen even though we still haven’t started testing any of them.

MinerEU does provide a dedicated Raspberry Pi image for Gridseed usb miner to their customers only. The image is now freely available, so you can download it and try it out if you are interested. We are going to give it a try for sure.

Hash Master apparently does provide their Raspberry Pi image along with the device if you purchase the complete controller package from them. We could not find their Pi image available for download other then the complete package they offer as a Pi-based controller with SD card and preloaded image on it, so we are not going to be able to test this image, but it seems to be pretty much Scripta with some visual modifications and the proper cgminer for Gridseed.

Zoom Hash does not give out much information about their image or even screenshots, but has a short guide and instructions for installing the image along with a download link available for everyone. We are going to be trying their image for the Raspberry Pi.

Hashra also does provide an image with some instructions to setup and use the Raspberry Pi as a controller for Gridseed ASIC devices. They do not sell RPi separately, but include it with their 20 miners package as a controller for the ASIC devices. They call their software for RPi Hashra Controla and it has web-based interface available.

This is it for now, time for testing the images. If you know about another Raspberry Pi image for Gridseed ASIC miners please feel free to share information about it so that we can include it in the list and also test it along with the others.

PB Mining With an Improved Website Interface and Functionality

25, Mar 2014

pb-mining-new-website

Today the Bitcoin cloud mining service PB Mining has updated their website, something that they have previously announced. Earlier today there was a message about the update pointing to the new IP address of the website, though some of you might still see that message until the DNS cache is refreshed. The new website is not a complete makeover, but more like adding new features and improvements to the interface of the service. We are happy to see that some of the things that we did not like about it initially are now fixed, such as the ability to update your Bitcoin payment wallet address. There is now more clearly structured and detailed information about your cloud hashrate and when your cloud mining contract expires and so on. There could be a few more issues n the next days that need to be worked on, but hopefully things will be back to normal and the support of the service is working to bring everything back to normal after the update.

We’ve been testing the service for a month already and though we had some concerns when we first started, now we can say that most of them are gone. The service has been running stable and problem free and we were getting our mined coins each week on time. We are still not ready to invest a lot of coins in the service as we are still testing it, but we are gradually adding more hashrate pretty much each week or when the difficulty has increased. The reason or that is the decrease in price per GHS that the service has with each difficulty adjustment to the already most attractive price they have for cloud mining.

At the moment they have 78 THS worth of hashrate and the option to buy a contract at 0.0075 BTC per GHS currently says that it has all been sold out. This however can be a result of temporary disabling the option to purchase new hashrate until everything is operating normally after the move, the same can also be true about new registrations. If you are already using the service and are having some issues try contacting the support or post in the dedicated thread about the service on Bitcointalk linked below.

– To the PB Mining cloud mining service dedicated topic at the Bitcointalk forum…


top