Archive for the ‘Mining Software’ Category

Decred (DCR), a New Hybrid PoW/PoS Altcoin Launching Soon

5, Feb 2016

cgminer-decred-dcr

Decred (DCR) is a new open, progressive, and self-funding crypto currency with a system of community-based governance integrated into its blockchain. At its core is a hybridized proof-of-work proof-of-stake (PoW/PoS) consensus system that aims to strike a balance between PoW miners and PoS voters to create a more robust notion of consensus. The project is a result of the theoretical proposals brought by proof-of-activity (PoA) and MC2 in 2013. Decred development started in April, 2014 with a single developer and expanded to include developers from btcsuite shortly thereafter.

Decred is currently running on testnet preparing for the launch of the mainnet on 12:00 PM CST February 8th, 2016. There crypto currency uses Blake256 14-rounds algorithm for mining and there is a cgminer fork (source) already available for testing, though currently only getwork is supported and not stratum. The cgminer for Decred GPU mining is available below compiled for 64-bit Windows ready for testing on some of the few currently available mining pools that also run on the testnet (will be switching to mainnet after the official launch). The cgminer works on both AMD and Nvidia GPUs as the currently available ccMiner forks from tpruvot and sp do not currently work with Decred even though they do have support for Blake256 14-rounds mining.

Trying out the cgminer for Decred (DRC) on an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 has shown an average hashrate of about 1.3 GHS and trying the miner on an AMD Radeon R9 280X has shown a hashrate of about 1.3 GHs as well with both runningn at stock frequencies. There is already quite a lot of interest and a large community forming around the Decred crypto currency even before the official launch, so this is something that is worth checking out if you still have not heard about it. Also make sure you get ready for the official launch of the coin on Monday. Some good places to trade Decred (DCR) include Bittrex, Binance and Livecoin.

– Download and try the cgminer fork for mining Decred on Windows (64-bit miner)…

Revisiting the Coin Magi (XMG) CPU-only Altcoin

28, Jan 2016

m-minerd-xmg-miner

We haven’t paid a lot of attention lately to alternative crypto coins that are mined only with CPU with no GPU, FPGA or ASIC miners, so we’ve decided to check what is going on with Coin Magi (XMG) as we haven’t been following it actively the last few months. Coin Magi is a PoW and PoS coin that is currently being traded for a little over 2000 satoshi per coin, it is being traded on multiple altcoin exchanges including some of the largest ones, though the trade volume at the moment is pretty low and there are multiple pools where you can mine the coin if you do have some spare CPU power available and you are wondering what to mine.

Coin Magi (XMG) uses the M7M algorithm and besides CPU mining and staking coins you can also rent mining rigs at the Mining Rig Rentals service. Last year we have tested the most up to date miner available for XMG – the Wolf0 m7m v2 cpuminer on an Intel Core i7 5820k CPU and now we have retested again in order to compare it with a more recent release in the form of a dedicated m-minerd for XMG (source) that is based on Wolf0’s code. The 32-bit version is significantly slower, so we do recommend to go for the 64-bit miner for best performance, but interestingly enough we are getting slightly less performance for, the new miner. The advantage that the new m-minerd miner for the M7M algorithm has an option for that allows you to set the percentage of CPU usage you want the miner to take.

Intel Core i7 5820k (6C 12T) CPU:
– Wolf0 minerd 64-bit – 122 KHS
– m-minerd 32-bit – 64 KHS
– m-minerd 64-bit – 119 KHS

– To download and try the Coin Magi (XMG) m-minerd CPU miner compiled for different OSes…

Updated ccMiner 1.5.78-git Fork by SP with Vanillacoin Blake256 Support

27, Jan 2016

ccminer-sp-vanillacoin

New update in the form of a Windows binary compiled from the latest Git source code of the ccMiner 1.5.78-git SP-MOD fork by SP optimized for the latest Maxwell-based video cards (source). The latest release adds support for the new Blake256 algorithm that Vanillacoin (VNL) has just forked to from WhirlpoolX. Do note that the Blake256 algorithm used by Vanillacoin is slightly different from the one used by BlakeCoin, so you need to use the one specifically for Vanillacoin! Do note that the SP-MOD fork of ccMiner is designed for Nvidia Maxwell GPUs such as the already available GTX 750, 750 Ti as well as the newer GTX 960, GTX 970, GTX 980 and GTX 980 Ti and GTX Titan X. The Windows binary release we have made available here is with support for Compute 5.0 and Compute 5.2 GPUs or with other words only for Maxwell-based Nvidia video cards compiled with CUDA 7.5 and VS2013.

– To download the latest ccMiner for Maxwell version 1.5.78-git with Vanillacoin Blake256 support…


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