It Is All About BTC, LTC, ETH, DOGE, KAS mining as well as other alternative crypto currencies
Bitmain has made available a new 96KHS ASIC miner for Bytom (BTM) called Antminer B7 as a successor of their Antminer B3 ASIC from about a year ago that was offering just 780 H/s mining hashrate with 360 Watts of power usage. After the release of the B3 ASIC last year the development of a much faster GPU miner for Bytom’s Tensority algorithm began and currently most recent GPUs are delivering quite good hashrates for BTM mining. The new Bitmain Antminer B7 ASIC is going to put out a more serious competition however for anyone interested in minig BTM.
The new Bitmain Antminer B7 ASIC is currently only available on the Chinese website of Bitmain and promises 96 KHS hashrate with just 528 Watts of power usage, so tough competition for GPUs in term of hashrate and power usage. The price of the new Antminer B7 ASIC miner is currently set at 9900 Chinese Yuan or a little less than $1500 USD, but ordering the device to Europe or US can easily bump the price to over 2K. When you look at the current low profit numbers however you may very quickly decide not to invest in these new ASIC miners however…
The most recent version of the fastest NBMiner 21.0 GPU miner for Bytom (BTM) is capable of delivering about 3.4 KHS for a single GTX 1070 Ti, 5 KHS for a single GTX 1080 Ti and 11.5 KHS for GTX 2080 GPUs according to the official information from the developer. This means that a 8x GTX 2080 GPUs mining rig would be needed in order to deliver hashrate similar to that of the Antminer B7, but it will end up significantly pricier and with higher power usage.
– You can visit the official Chinese website of Bitmain for more details on the new B7 ASIC miner…
The latest Bminer 13.0.0 should be the preferred choice for a Nvidia GPU miners that are currently mining Grin as it offers the best performance at the moment compared to other available miners. However there are still some things that may need extra work such as full worker support for Sparkpool (one of the first and largest currently available for Grin mining). At the moment you can use Bminer with Sparkpool, but all your rigs will be under a single worker called “miner-rig-0” as the worker setting of the pool interfere with the settings for pool, username and password schema that Bminer uses. The extra performance of up to about 50-60% compared to other miners such as NBminer or GMiner and others is well worth it. There is apparently a way to actually setup a worker on Sparkpool, you just need to escape the slash used for setting up a worker name and it will work just fine, here you ca find a short guide on how to do it.
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 13.0.0 Nvidia GPU miner…
Grin is a new crypto project for creating a the private and lightweight mimblewimble blockchain that would provide electronic transactions for everyone without censorship or restrictions. The algorithm that Grin uses is Cuckoo Cycle with 1 minute block time, 60 GRIN block reward and no limit on coin supply or reward halving. There is not going to be any ICO, founders reward, pre-mine or masternodes available for this project, so people that do not like any of these should be Ok with this project. Miners for Grin are still currently being developed, although there are some already announced or available, though initially it could be a bit of a challenge to make things work with the right miner and pool. For instance the official MWGrinPool is currently not taking new registrations, though new pools should be available as alternatives. There are already a couple of options for pools on the Testnet where you can test the mining before the Mainnet launch like Spark Pool. Some good places to trade GRIN include CoinEgg, Gateio, HitBTC and Bittrex.
The official open-source Grin Miner software is currently only available for Linux and Mac OS X and it supports both CUDA and OpenCL mining. For miners looking for Windows miners there is the Grin Gold Miner (with 1% fee for the Grin Development Fund and 1% fee for further miner development), although it also works with Linux) that supports all AMD and NVIDIA 8GB cards (requires a GPU with 8GB VRAM!). Do note however that Nvdia RTX 8GB cards need Linux or Windows 7 due to memory addressing issues. RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti are fastest in terms of performance if you manage to make them work, OpenCL code for AMD cards is currently still being optimized. Cheaper slower Celeron CPUs are not recommended for many cards on the system (similar to Merit and BITC that also use the same algorithm for mining). Another alternative for Windows miners should be the GrinPro Miner that is not yet available for download and that will have 2% developer fee. This miner should work on AMD and Nvidia GPUs with 8GB VRAM, although it promises upcoming support for 6GB VRAM cards as well, so that could be interesting for some users.
Unfortunately zjazz, who was pretty active in miner development for Cuckoo Cycle support for Merit and BITC hasn’t updated his miner for a while and will probably not be supporting Grin mining at least for the moment. The latest version of Bminer that was just made available however also comes with experimental support for mining Grin, so you might want to check it out as well. Do note that it is a closed source miner with 2% developer fee, so have that in mind as well when checking out different miners for Grin. The latest version of the closed source miner NBMiner has also just added support for the Cuckaroo algorithm used by Grin (both Windows and Linux), so you can give it a try as well (Nvidia only).