Baikal Miner BK-D, a New First Dual Mining ASIC Miner

13 Jun
2018

Does somebody still remember the Gridseed ASIC miners that could dual-mine BTC and LTC a few years ago? Well, it seems that a new dual mining ASIC miner is coming from Baikal Miner that is capable of mining two different algorithms at the same time. The new Baikal Miner BK-D supports Blake256R14 or Blake256R8 as first algorithm with 280 GHS hashrate and LBRY or Pascal as second algorithm with 70 GHS. You can have the miner mine any of the two pairs of algorithms simultaneously at 1100W of power usage total.

There is still no information about pricing and availability however, Biakal Miner have just announced their new device and it is yet to even become listed on the official company website. Doesn’t seem like too profitable at the moment, so it is more of an interesting product as we did not have dual miners in the fork of ASICs for quite some time. Availability and pricing of the device can make all the difference, so we need to wait and see what they will be. With a price of $2100 USD without a PSU it seems even less interesting…

Bitcoin Gold’s New Equihash-BTG PoW Algorithm

13 Jun
2018

Bitmain’s Equihash ASIC miners Z9 mini as well as Innosilicon’s A9 ZMaster are apparently being shipped and are getting into the hands of some users already. This essentially makes mining Equihash with GPUs pointless and not very profitable, so ZCash (ZEC) is already in the territory of ASIC miners, but not all of the crypto coins that used Equihash are going to just move from GPU mining to ASIC miners. Bitcoin Gold (BTG) for example is going to switch to a new proof of work algorithm they call Equihash-BTG which is essentially a modified version of the Equihash algorithm that will not be ASIC mineable.

Equihash-BTG is essentially going to fork to a modified version of the Equihash PoW algorithm with parameters that will require significantly more memory thus making ASIC miners harder to be made for it and no so efficient. We have already seen that with ASIC miners having a higher memory requirement makes it not impossible, but more like much less efficient performance wise if we consider as an example the Bitmain Antminer E3 ASIC miner for Ethereum’s Ethash algorithm. So Bitcoin Gold (BTC) will not become ASIC resistant forever with its algorithm change, but it will be safe for quite some time at least as we all know when there is an incentive (a lot of money involved) nothing can stop the ASIC miners.

The change of the PoW algorithm used by Bitcoin Gold will become active with a Hard Fork, though there is still no information or a planned block number or date when the fork will happen. So for the moment BTG is still using Equihash and can be mined using ASIC miners designed for this algorithm, but when it switches to the new algorithm it will be GPU mineable again and hopefully it will be still worth mining it by that time.

– For more details about Bitcoin Gold’s new Equihash-BTG PoW algorithm…

New ccminer 2.2.6 Tpruvot Fork with PHI2 and Allium Support

12 Jun
2018

It has been a while since we have seen an update of tpruvot’s ccminer fork (source), but there it is now a new version 2.2.6 that comes with support for the new PHI2 algorithum for Luxcoin (LUX) that has just forked from the old PHI1612 as well as support for the new Allium algorithm for Garlic. There is an official binary release compiled for Windows available for download, do note it is a 64-bit only and it has been compiled with CUDA 9.0, so make sure that you have up to date video drivers for your Nvidia GPUs installed.

On a side note, Mining Rig Rentals has also just added support for people willing to buy or sell their PHI2 mining hahsrate. So if you need more PHI2 mining power or want to sell your hashrate instead, then you might want to check it out as well. There are still just a few rigs available, but with demand there should be more appearing and if there is demand you can also make some extra profit leasing your rig(s) as well.

– To download and try the latest ccminer v2.2.6 Windows 64-bit binary…

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