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 due to the peak of price and interest in Bitcoin (BTC) even the largest cloud mining companies like Genesis Mining are having trouble securing enough mining equipment in larger quantities fast in order to satisfy the growing demand. The company has started a limited pre-sale of Bitcoin cloud mining contracts with mining expected to start on 28.02.2018 or roughly more than 3 and a half months from now when you can purchase hashrate. As a regular customer if you want to purchase a Bitcoin mining ASIC from Bitmain you would still need to pre-order with current batches scheduled for early 2018 shipping as well, though you can manage to find some overpriced Antminer S9 units in stock currently for sale as well. Unfortunately alternatives to Bitmain such as Canaan’s AvalonMiner 741 are also out of stock at the moment and that goes even for the less know and popular Ebit E9 miners as well.
Securing Bitcoin mining hardware or even cloud mining contract for such seems to be not so easy at the moment, and even the GPU mining craze from earlier this year has calmed down and profits through altcoin mining and selling for BTC are not as high and attractive for many users. Aside from Bitcoin cloud mining hashrate the company is also selling Ethereum cloud mining contracts with immediate start and the same goes for Monero and Zcash mining contracts. Currently DASH and Litecoin mining contracts are not available, though we would be extra careful with DASH specially due to the inflow of many new X11 ASIC miners on the market and difficulty skyrocketing on a daily basis. Litecoin has been more active lately and things are moving there as well and the user interest is higher in mining capacity for Scrypt ASIC miners as well as even for cloud mining options.
– If you are interested in checking out the current cloud mining offers of Genesis Mining…
Here is a ccMiner fork based on alexis78 code, but with added support for the KeccakC algorightm (source) used for CreativeCoin (CREA) mining. KeccakC is a slightly different variation of the Keccak algorithm, but it still requires modified miner to support it, so you still need to use a compatible miner for coins like CREA that use it. If you are looking for an sgminer with KeccakC support check this Windows binary from the official project website (source).
We have compiled a 32-bit Windows binary of the ccMiner frok from cornz with KeccakC support as it was requested by readers and you can download and try it from the link below. It is compiled with Visual Studio 2013 and CUDA 7.5, the supported Nvidia GPUs are Maxwell or Pascal-based ones (Compute 5.0 or newer). The performance we are seeing is similar to that of the original Keccak algorithm, so you can expect to see similar performance if you have mined a Keccak-based coin recently. Again, have in mind that Keccak and KeccakC although similar are not compatible with each other and you need to use the respective algorithm for the coins that use it!
– To download and try the ccMiner 32-bit Windows binary with KeccakC algorithm supported…
One of the most interesting things about the new Bitcoin Gold (BTG) is that after forking from Bitcoin it will adopt a different mining algorithm and the chosen one is Equihash (the one introduced by ZCash), so the new coin will be mineable with video cards and not ASICs. This is what is essentially getting the attention of the many GPU miner out there that do not have any or just a little ASIC mining power. This is essentially eliminating the large ASIC mining farms from able to mine the coin as there are currently no known ASIC miners available for the Equihash algorithm, though it still cannot do anything about any large GPU mining farms and such also exist similar to the big ASIC mining farms. Still smaller GPU miners will be able to get into the mining of Bitcoin Gold (BTG) even with one video card, something they are not able to do with Bitcoin anymore.
There are still thing that are not clear about the fork such as what exchanges will support it and will credit the users holding Bitcoin with BTG after the fork. Some exchanges like hibtc and Yobit, along with a few mining pools, have expressed their will to support Bitcoin Gold. The biggest and most used Bitcoin exchanges however are still to come out with official statements regarding the fork, so the best thing is to hold your Bitcoins in a local wallet where you have full control over the private key in order to be able to claim BTG coins after the fork. The exchanges are probably waiting to decide based on user interest as well as to see if the fork will be successful and problem free and come out with statements after that or their users may force them to.
The things that are not getting too much attention are mostly centered around the final specifications of the coin that are not very clear. For example the initial announcement mentioned tat the Bitcoin Gold (BTG) fork will have 16000 blocks premined with 12.5 BTG reward for each (200000 BTC coins) that will be sold to ICO investors, though the official project website does not talk about that at all. The fact that the BTG is capped at 21 Million coins just like Bitcoin and adopts 10 minute lock time, just like the original BTC, 12.5 BTG current coin reward?, halving every 4 years maybe? and so on… Since there have been already 16.6 Million BTC mined with a total of 21 that leaves less than 4.5 Million coins left to be mined over a very long period of time. All of these kinda leave a big question mark about the mining part of BTG and as we’ve explained there are still important things that are not very clear just a few days before the fork happening.
– Visit the official website of the Bitcoin Gold (BTG) project here for more details…