Archive for the ‘General Info’ Category

Ethereum’s Blockchain Data Continues to Grow Rapidly in Size

10, May 2016

ethereum-blockchain-file-size

It is not even a year since the mining of Ethereum’s Ether (ETH) coins has started and due to the short block time and the huge user interest the total size of the blockchain data of Ethereum has already grown huge and continues to grow rapidly. The current size of the Ethereum blockchain data files is already over 16 GB and just about two months ago it was a bit over 9 GB. With the increasing demands for storage to host the full blockchain data as a part of a local wallet or a full network node more users might be switching to online wallets and other services that do not require the user to have a local copy of the data files such as exchanges for example. With more users getting into Ethereum the number of transactions on the network is also growing and by the time when the switch from PoW to PoS phase happens we could even have Ethereum’s blockchain size getting close to that of Bitcoin. If you look only at ETH alone even 20 GB might not be that much, but if you have a local Bitcoin wallet as well as a few other crypto wallets installed on a PC with the full blockchain stored locally you might even start experiencing issues with available free space and things will only get worse with the fast increase of the size of the blockchain data.

The Current State of X11 ASIC Miners and the X11 Market

8, May 2016

ibelink-asic-profitability

If you are in the market for X11 ASICs then you might want to reconsider as the profitability at the moment is nothing like when the first batch of iBeLink X11 miners started shipping. Now iBeLink is shipping to customers their second batch with a limit of up to 3 miners per customer and PinIdea, another company also started shipping their faster and more power efficient miners (1 per customer), though they had some shipping issues, so there could be delays. Later this month, apart from the large 384 MHS ASIC from iBeLink and the 500 MHS from PinIdea, we are waiting the release of smaller single chip USB X11 ASIC miners from PinIdea in the range of about 8 MHS per device to help the decentralization.

On the image above is a quick check of the current profit for miners using X11 ASICs from iBeLink, selling your hashrate is still the most profitable, but not by much compared to directly mining for DASH. You are going to be getting about 0.05 BTC or about $25 USD or about 3.5 DASH per day with that X11 ASIC at today’s rates, but you can expect that the profit will go down with more mining hardware becoming available.

pinidea-asic-profitability

This is the situation with the faster and more power efficient X11 ASIC miner from PinIdea, faster and more energy efficient, but also more expensive to purchase. You can expect to get about 0.65 BTC or about $32 USD or about 4.6 DASH per day with that X11 ASIC miner at today’s rates and the numbers will also go down with more miners getting released.

The problem with the release of a lot of X11 ASIC mining hardware is that the X11 market is still relatively small with only Dash having a very strong and big network at the moment and not that many “big” X11 other altcoins, not that many in overall as well. As a result in the short term we might see a decline in the profitability for X11 especially with more big ASIC miners coming online and even though GPU miners would start moving away from X11 you should still carefully consider to invest or not in X11 ASIC hardware at the moment. On the long term however we expect to see the transition of X11 from GPUs to ASIC miners and though it may be a bumpy road, hopefully things will not get out of hand and a lot of X11 hashrate getting centralized in the hands of few essentially leading to the loss of user interest in everything X11 and coins forking to other algorithms.

New Open Source Ethereum Mining Pool Available

28, Apr 2016

open-source-ethereum-mining-pool

If you want to run your own private or public mining pool for Ethereum (ETH) you might be interested in the release of the new open Open Source Ethereum Mining Pool by sammy007 (source). The pool software is functional, however an optimized release of the pool is expected to be released soon as it is being further developed to provide an easy to use pool for Ethereum miners. It already supports getwork and stratum mining, relies on the geth Go Client for Ethereum as a backend and provides good stats for miners to track their mining progress. Do note that as with other pool software although it may not be that hard to setup things, but some experience in managing and maintaining a server and a pool can be quite helpful.

– For additional details and to download and run the new Ethereum pool software…


top