Crypto Mining Blog
It Is All About BTC, LTC, ETH, DOGE, KAS mining as well as other alternative crypto currencies
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It seems that there was another issue with the Go Ethereum client (geth) that was causing the difficulty of the Ethereum network to increase at high pace even when the network hashrate is not actually increasing. The problem has been identified and if you are using the geth client for solo mining or as a local wallet you should upgrade to the latest geth version 1.1.2 (source). It is more important however that the Ethereum mining pools update to the latest geth client as apparently this is the preferred client used by the pools and not the alternative cpp-ethereum that is not affected. After the fix has been deployed we should start seeing the Ethereum network difficulty to start to normalize. We have provided the updated Windows binary of geth 1.1.2 in our package intended for getting started with Ethereum. If you haven’t checked our guides for Ethereum solo mining and Ethereum pool mining on Windows using geth and ethminer, as well as our guide on Ethereum mining with cpp-ethereum.
Do note that if you are currently mining for the Shift (SHF) – the first altcoin that has been forked from Ethereum, then you should also update to the latest client. The Shift client software is based on the Go Ethereum client code, so it is affected by the same difficulty issue as Ethereum was, but this has been addressed in their latest update as well.
– Download the latest geth and ethminer compiled for Windows and ready to be used…
The first alternative crypto currency that is based on the Ethereum code called Shift (SHF) has been launched and you can currently solo mine it if you are willing to check it out (source). Since Shift uses the same mining algorithm as Ethereum you can mine the coin using ethminer just like you will do with Ethereum, you can check our Quick Guide on Solo GPU Mining Ethereum on Windows if you need some help. The Shift client is based on geth (Go Ethereum Client) so it is pretty straightforward if you have used it for Ethereum already. The most notable difference with Shift is that they have launched a simple GUI wallet that works requires the shift client also working, but it makes things like knowing your balance and sending transactions much easier than just typing commands in the console. There are already pre-compiled binaries available for Windows and Linux for the client and the GUI wallet, so there is no need to compile from source to get things started.
Update: The first mining pool for Shift is now available – shift.suprnova.cc, pool mining is the same as for Ethereum – help on pool mining. There is also a basic block explorer for Shift (SHF) now also available that may come handy, even for quickly checking your balance when you have no direct access to a local wallet for example. The first crypto currency exchange that has added Shift (SHF) is Bleutrade.
– For more information about Shift (SHF) check the coins announcement thread…
Last week Nvidia has announced a new mid-range GPU, namely the GTX 950 that is being positioned between the GTX 750 Ti and the GTX 960. Interestingly enough the GTX 950 has 128 CUDA cores more than 750 Ti and a TDP of 90W with a price point that is a bit higher than the 750 Ti, so the big question is if the GTX 950 can be the new affordable and low-power usage alternative for mining suceeding the 750 Ti. We took an MSI GeForce GTX 950 Gaming 2G video card and have tested how it performs for crypto mining in various algorithms using the latest ccMiner fork from SP optimized fro Maxwell GPUs as the GTX 950 is Compute 5.2 card. We have also tested using Ethminer for mining Ethereum’s Ether (ETH) coins as these are pretty hot and profitable to mine at the moment.
The table above does not contain results for the following algorithms that are supported by ccMiner: lyra2, skein, yescrypt, whirl, x14, x17 as when trying to test them we have encountered errors or the miner software crashing. We are not sure if this is directly related to the use of GTX 950 and the default intensity settings not working for some algorithms, or just that there are issues with the specific algorithms in the latest code of ccMiner. The TDP result shows how much power the video card uses for each of the algorithm with 100% TDP being equal to 90W of power usage on a normal GTX 950, but on the MSI factory overclocked Gaming model the 100% TDP is actually equal to 110W. As you can see however very fee of the algorithms are getting close to the maximum TDP of the GTX 950, so the actual power usage could be even lower than 90W on most of the algorithms.