It Is All About BTC, LTC, ETH, DOGE, KAS mining as well as other alternative crypto currencies
There is a new fork of GRIN based on the MimbleWimble protocol called Epic Cash (EPIC) that has officially launched their blockchain a day or so ago. EPIC can be CPU, GPU, and ASIC-mined with 3 different algorithms available for each type of hardware and block rewards are distributed according to a schedule that balances wide distribution with long-term security. One of the main goals of the project is to offer high level of privacy to the users with a monetary policy very similar to that of Bitcoin (BTC). This includes a maximum supply of 21 million coins and a higher initial emission in order to reach and synchronize with Bitcoin in terms of available coins in a couple of years time frame. The so called Epic Singularity will happe in 2028 when the Epic circulating supply intersects the number of Bitcoin’s circulating supply, at which point Epic Cash adopts the Bitcoin block reward and halving pattern. Until then the starting block reward is 16 coins halving around every year initially and then around every two until it reaches a halving every 4 years.
The Epic Cash blockchain is initially available to CPU, GPU, and ASIC miners by using three respective hashing algorithms: RandomX, ProgPow, and CuckAToo31+ wih different percent distribution for each one starting with higher CPU advantage and slowly transitioning to GPUs and then ASICs. Since for the moment there are not publicly available CuckAToo31+ ASIC miners the algo is available for GPUs as well, however work is being done by multiple manufacturers and maybe by the end of this year or early next year such devices might become available on the market (optimistically speaking). So far, so good the project looks interesting and promising, though not everything seems to be that great for non-advanced users interested in mining EPIC. If you are looking for a crypto exchange where you can trade EPIC, then you can head on to Citex.
First of all EPIC can currently be only solo mined and since it is based on GRIN codebase, just like GRIN it is not that user friendly running and mining it. LINUX users have a better advantage as for example the CUDA GPU miner is not officially available for Windows yet and the OpenCL one is giving trouble and using third party ProgPow miners for solo mining the coin is also a kind of a challenge with no pool available yet. CPU mining is working pretty well with the available miner, but solo mining with the already high difficulty could be a challenge for most users to mine even one block. mining pools should be coming out shortly with talk about icemining probably being the first on the train, though nothing official about that yet.
– If you are interested in checking out more details about the Epic Cash (EPIC) project…
The Conceal (CCX) project is another attempt at a privacy oriented crypto coin that offers some interesting features one of which is the so called Decentralized Banking with coins getting locked to earn interest. Conceal is based on the Cryptonote protocol and uses the so called CryptoNightConceal algorithm, a variation that is based on CryptoNight and thus is considered to be an “AMD Coin” due to the fact that AMD GPUs usually do perform better in CN algos. With low mining profits and with more people looking into mining other interesting projects however even Nvidia GPU miners are looking into potentially interesting CN-based coins. Some exchanges to trade CCX coins include Citex, Stex, qTrade and Graviex.
With the latest CryptoDredge v0.21.0 Nvidia GPU miner support for the CryptoNightConceal algorithm has been added and the performance does not seem that bad. The performance you can expect from a GTX 1080 Ti is around the same an RX 580 8GB can do (around 1700 h/s) per GPU. With the help of the OhGodAnETHlargementPill you can get an extra ~200 h/s per GPU and the best of all is that the power usage is pretty low compared to most Nvidia GPU algorithms (around 850W per 6x GTX 1080 Ti GPU mining rig at the wall). So you might want to give this a go, though currently the profitability even in this case is not that attractive, but hey… you are risking with something with potential here, that is the whole idea, right?
For a lot of people there is only Bitcoin (BTC) and a couple of other popular forks for Bitcoin such as Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV or Bitcoin Gold, but in reality there are much more than just these. According to a website called Forkdrop that is tracking the available Bitcoin, as well as some altcoin forks, the number is quite big already – there are 105 Bitcoin fork projects in total, though not all of them are active or operational yet. Of those 105 in total, 74 are considered active projects relevant to holders of Bitcoin (BTC) and the remaining 31 are considered historic and are no longer relevant. Furthermore of the 74 active Bitcoin fork projects 45 projects have a currently-operating blockchain network capable of transacting and 29 projects do not have a currently-operating blockchain network capable of transacting, however are considered to be still in development.
You might be interested in checking these Bitcoin forks, especially if you have held bitcoins for a long time and are in full control of your private keys/wallets as you might be able to claim some of these coins for free. With some of these Bitcoin forks you are entitled to 1:1 of the respective coins you had in BTC at the time of the fork others have provided airdrops or are still providing for the holders of coins at a specific block at which the fork occurred and a snapshot has been made. The idea is that some of these projects are more or less established and have a decent trading volume and are present on exchanges, so it could be some free money for you or an extra bag of coins to hold for a better future. Either way it is worth checking out the information provided by Forkdrop as it might be helpful and profitable.
– Check out the website Forkdrop for more information about the available Bitcoin forks…