Archive for the ‘Mining Software’ Category

Official ccMiner 1.8.1 fork by tpruvot With SiaCoin (SC) Support

11, Aug 2016

ccminer-1-8-1-tpruvot

Tpruvot has made an official release of his updated ccMiner fork (source) version 1.8.1 along with Windows x86 and x64 binaries available for download. The x86 Windows binary is compiled with VS2013 and CUDA 8.0 RC and the x64 binary is compiled with CUDA 7.5, it is best to use the latest video drivers to have support for CUDA 8.0.

The new ccMiner 1.8.1 adds support for mining Siacoin (SC) on Nvidia GPUs using CUDA, SIA uses Blake2-B algorithm, though at the moment different pools still seem to rely on different protocols for mining and not all of them are yet supported by ccMiner. The miner supports the SIA Nanopool RPC (getwork over http) as well as the getwork over Stratum implementation of Suprnova, but not yet the Siaminingpool stratum protocol (you should still be able to mine there via getwork). The hashrate seems to be slightly better than that Sia Go Miner that uses OpenCL and also works on Nvidia GPUs.

The new version 1.8.1 also comes with small improvement in the LBRY hashrate improvements (by alexis78) over the previous release 1.8 that introduced Library Credits mining. So if you are mining LBC with Nvidia GPUs, then you might wan to update to the new release in order to get slightly better hashrate. The Lyra2RE support has also been updated with the with the Nanashi Meiyo-Meijin improvements, so it should be faster than before.

– To download the latest official ccMiner version 1.8.1 by tpruvot for Windows…

New Faster HODLminer and a New Mining Pool For It Now Available

3, Aug 2016

hodlminer-optiminer-fork
Recently, hodl crypto has implemented a hardfork that changed the way mining works for the coin essentially driving away miners in favor of the people that already hold the coin. The change required mined coins to be help for 1 year before being released to users for use, so the existing pools kind of gave up on continuing as they usually operate on a mining fee and miners fled from the coin. The only way that was left to mine was using the in-wallet built-in miner that is slower than the already existing miners that could be used only for pool mining. The only advantage that was left was that the mined coins from 50 per block when mined would gain interest and would be much more when they were released to the user. Regardless this kind of made us loose interest in HODL for the moment as here we like coins that can be mined…

Recently there has been new somewhat positive development that may bring some miner back to mining HODL or at least trying to as the 1 year waiting time for the coins to be released is still there. Anyway, there is a new further optimized HODLminer forked by optiminer from Wolf’s code that does provide significant performance improvement (source). Below you can find a 64-bit Windows binary of the miner that you can use to mine HODL on your CPU, do note however that you still need to have a more recent AMD or Intel processor with AES-NI support in order to use the miner. You should also be able to use the slower non-AES-NI capable miner that you can find here for older CPUs without the required instruction support. Do note that you should be able to use this miner for other coins that rely on the HODL algorithm as there are apparently some already available such as ERC.

Performance for Intel Core i5820K CPU:
– Old Wolf HOLD miner: 250 H/s
– Optimized Optiminer fork: 560 H/s

The new miner however would be useless without a dedicated mining pool (it does not work with solo mining using the HODL wallet), so the same author also launched Optiminer HOdlcoin Mining Pool where you can point the miner to mine HODL for you. It is a PPLNS pool with 1.0% fee and requires 25 confirmations until a pending block counts as mined. Do note that all HODL coins are still locked for one year after mining as there is currently no way to withdraw the balance for miners. Instead, once the balance reaches at least 50 HODL, it gets eligible for including in a mining block. The next block will always be mined to the address of the miner which has the highest eligible balance at which point you would still have to wait for 1 year to actually be able to use these mined coins.

– To download and try the new optimized HODLminer and the new mining pool…

A Quick Guide on How to Mine Steem on Windows

27, Jul 2016

steem-website

Steem is a blockchain-based social media platform where anyone can earn rewards by contributing quality content and rating content published by others. You can also mine it using a dedicated CPU miner if you have some spare power that you want to dedicate to supporting the network. The information regarding Steem is still highly fragmented and you need to spend quite a lot of time figuring things out even though they do not seem to be that complicated. We have spent some time trying to get things working and we have managed to successfully start mining Steem, so we have prepared a short guide to help you get started mining on Windows.

The first thing you need to start with before moving with the actual mining is to register yourself an account on the steemit website. Do note that registering currently requires you to either have a Facebook or Reddit account to use as a means of verification for your registration. After you register you can also earn Steem by posting quality articles on the website and interacting in the community in general and then you can also start mining using the guide below.

steemd-first-run

– Start by downloading the latest Steem Windows Wallet and Miner for Windows

– The miner binary is compiled for 64-bit Windows, so it will not work on 32-bit ones

– Extract the steem-win-x64-012-2.zip archive to a folder on your computer and run steemd.exe

– The first time you run the Steem Daemon executable it will create a witness_node_data_dir directory and inside will generate some additional files and folders

steem-config-ini

– Go inside the witness_node_data_dir folder and open the config.ini file with Notepad or another text editor

– Start by adding a few steem nodes to connect to, just paste the following list under P2P nodes to connect to on startup:

seed-node = 52.38.66.234:2001
seed-node = 52.37.169.52:2001
seed-node = 52.26.78.244:2001
seed-node = 192.99.4.226:2001
seed-node = 46.252.27.1:1337
seed-node = 81.89.101.133:2001
seed-node = 52.4.250.181:39705
seed-node = steemd.pharesim.me:2001
seed-node = seed.steemed.net:2001
seed-node = steem.clawmap.com:2001
seed-node = seed.steemwitness.com:2001
seed-node = steem-seed1.abit-more.com:2001

– Under the name of witness add your steemit.com username (you need to register prior to start mining), so make sure it is something like: witness = "myusername"

– Under the name of miner and its private key add your steemit.com username and private key, so make sure it is something like: miner = ["myusername","yourWIFprivatekeyhere"]

– When setting different parameters in the ini file make sure you don’t leave the # sign in front of the line as it essentially comments it out and the miner behaves as this parameter is not set, so you can get an error that a witness or miner is not set!

– If you are not sure where to get the private key, then just login to your steemit.com account, go to your Profile and then to the Permissions tab. Here you need to click on Show the private key for Active (you may need to relogin first). Do note that the key shown by default is the public key, you need to show the private key and use the private key in the config! Alternatively you can use the Owner private key, this is also your login password, but due to security reasons you better stick with the Active key.

– Under the Number of threads to use add mining-threads = 1 or higher number, depending on how much of your CPU you want to utilize for mining, more threads result in higher hashrate

steem-cpu-mining

– You are now ready to start mining, just run steemd.exe again and wait for the blockchain to synchronize, it could take something like 15-30 minutes or more (depending on your internet connection)

– The steem blockchain is over 3.5 million block already, but the size is not that huge yet, it is around 3.3 GB in size, so you will need more than that free space available

– In our tests with an Intel Core i7 5820K CPU (6 cores, 12 threads) running at 12 threads configured in the ini file we are getting about 44390 HPS (hashes per second) as a hashrate or around 31-33 KHS with just 6 active threads

– Do note that the mining apparently requires a lot of RAM, we get about 3GB used for 6 threads and about 5GB used for 12 threads for mining, so make sure you have enough RAM in your computer (8GB or more is recommended)

– All you have to do now is to wait for your miner to first find a POW block and then put you in the Miner-witness queue until your turn comes in to confirm a block in order to get your reward transferred to your steemit.com account

– Note that the rewards you get when you successfully mine and confirm a block are in STEEM POWER tokens and not in STEEM and they should appear in your Wallet on steemit.com, earning you 1 for each block. STEEM POWER are influence tokens which earn more power by holding long term, the more you hold the more you influence post rewards and earn for accurate voting on steemit.com. STEEM POWER tokens can be withdrawn (Powered Down), but it will require 2 years and 104 payments to convert back to STEEM. This means that once you power down you will start receiving 1/104th of your Steem Power in the form of STEEM each week until you have withdrawn all (104 weeks or 2 years pass) or you manually cancel the power down, so you can withdraw STEEM, but it is slow and in parts…

– For additional information about Steem you can visit the official website…
– Take a look at the Steemit website where you are rewarded with Steem for using it…


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