Archive for the ‘Mining Software’ Category

The VeriBlock (VBK) project has recently launched its mainnet after a long period of testing and has just finished an IEO (Initial Exchange Offering) on the Bittrex exchange with all coins available in it sold in just about 10 seconds, so apparently there is quite the interest. VeriBlock’s technology supposedly delivers Bitcoin-level security to both new and established blockchain and cryptocurrency projects that may otherwise be vulnerable. This enables crypto coin development teams to focus on the innovative features and functionality of their project, rather than worrying about possible attacks.

VeriBlock is both PoW (Proof of Work) and PoP (Proof-of-Proof) coin, so you can mine it with your GPUs or spend some Bitcoins to PoP mine it. PoW miners are responsible for creating the blocks, providing the blockchain with intermediate consensus, and providing blockchains inheriting security through VeriBlock with a PoW-powered first line of defense. PoP miners are responsible for publishing a representation of the current state of the VeriBlock blockchain (and by proxy, all blockchains secured by VeriBlock) to Bitcoin in a fully DTTP manner. To trade VBK coins youmight want to head on to the Bittrex crypto exchange.

Here we are going to focus on PoW mining (vBlake2 algorithm) with AMD and Nvidia GPUs, for both of which there are miners available and a number of pools. Do note that although there are no ASIC miners available currently for VBK, apparently there are FPGAs already available for mining VeriBlock with hashrate equal to that of about three rigs with GTX 1080 Ti (~18 GHS). Using the latest nodecore pow CUDA miner 0.3.11 on GeForce GTX 1080 Ti you can expect to get around 800 MHS hashrate per card, while AMD GPU owners with the latest AMD VeriBlock miner the expected hashrate per Radeon RX 580 8GB should be around 300 MHS (similar to the performance of GTX 1060 or P106 GPUs).

Since the nodecore miners are not yet that stable and fully optimized and sometimes pools are not very responsive, it is wise to use a simple restart script to make sure that your mining rigs won’t end up staying idle. Here is an example BAT file for Windows for the miner:

:loop
Veriblock.exe -o vbk.luckypool.io:8501 -u VHmonhpN6fiuyNdJgGnwsJ741CvkZY -p x
goto loop

The above BATCH file should be fine for the miner cleanly exiting after it encounters some error, however on some Windows systems we have seen the miner crashing with an error window popping up and the above code will not help in such cases. If you experience such instability, then you can add a bit more automation in order to restart the miner every 30 minutes (1800 seconds) with the example code below:

:loop
start Veriblock.exe -o vbk.luckypool.io:8501 -u VHmonhpN6fiuyNdJgGnwsJ741CvkZY -p x
timeout /t 1800
taskkill /f /im Veriblock.exe
goto loop

In order to mine VeriBlock (VBK) locally, since it is not yet available on an exchange (it should very soon be active on Bittrex after the IEO), you will need to install the latest VeriBlock Nodecore 0.4.1, sync the VBK blockchain and then run the Nodecore Wallet GUI 0.4.0 (Java-based platform independent GUI). There are a number of mining pools available already, though most of them are not very user friendly and it is hard to keep a rack on your mining rewards (it is easier to track them at the local wallet than on the mining pool) we would recommend that you try the vbk.luckypool.io as it is currently the most user-friendly visually and functionality wise VBK mining pool out there.

In order to check the current state of the VeriBlock (VBK) network…

The latest Bminer 15.4.0 comes with improved performance for Cuckaroo29 and Aeternity algorithms as well as improved compatibility on Windows. There is a new experimental flag --fast to improve the performance for Cuckaroo29 / Aeternity, but it might lead to instability on some systems, so give it a try to see if it helps on your mining rigs and if they are stable with it. Performance wise the latest Bminer is slightly faster than the hashrate provided by the latest GMiner 1.36 for Cuckaroo29 on the same mining rig with GTX 1080 Ti where we have tested and compared results.

We remind you that that Bminer is a closed source Nvidia GPU miner available for Linux and Windows in the form of pre-compiled binaries and that there is a 2% development fee for Grin, Beam, Bytom (BTM), Equihash and Zhash coins, 0.65% for Ethash and 1.3% for dual mining Ethash and Blake.

To download and try the latest release of the Bminer 15.4.0 Nvidia GPU miner…

There is a new interesting tool released by Eliovp for modifying the video memory timings of AMD GPUs on the fly, so no need to modify and reflash the GPU BIOS anymore to do so. The not so good news for some users is that the tool is currently available for Linux only, but still you can test under Linux and make permanent changes via BIOS if needed after that for mining under Windows. The AMD Memory Tweak tool supports GDDR5 an HBM/HBM2 memory AMD GPUs and should be able to help increase hashrate in memory intensive algorithms such as Ethash for example. The AMD Memory Tweak tool is similar to the ETHlargementPill for Nvidia GDDR5X-based GPUs as an idea and functionality. The software is available as open source and is completely free to use, however you are welcome to send the author a tip if you find it useful.

To check out the AMD Memory Tweak tool for real time memory modifications on AMD GPUs…


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