Claymore’s Dual ETH GPU Miner v11.0 Now Available

8 Feb
2018

Claymore has released an update to his popular Ethereum dual miner for AMD and Nvidia GPUs with some new interesting and useful features as well as some small improvements. The new version 11 comes with two new algorithms that can be used in dual mining mode along with Ethereum or any other Ethash-based coin, these are Blake2s and Keccak. Another importan change is the reduced developer fee for dual mode that is now at 1.5% and the removal of the dev fee completely for video cards with just 2GB of video memory (you cannot mine ETH/ETC with these anymore, but the miner will work with other forks). The “-asm 2” option value now supports Tahiti, Tonga, Ellesmere, Baffin AMD GPUs and in some cases it can be a bit faster in ETH-only mode, so you can give it a try if you have a mining rig with any of these.

– To download and try the latest Claymore Dual Ethereum on Nvidia GPUs…

Bitmain Has Announced The Antminer V9, a “NEW” 4 THS ASIC

7 Feb
2018

The demand for Bitcoin mining hardware seems to causing some strange decisions among the ASIC manufacturers and one such is apparently the announcement of the Bitmain Antminer V9. A small 4 THS SHA256 ASIC miner that uses 1 KW of power, so not very efficient, but it comes cheap at just $345 USD. There are already some speculations that this could as well be old hardware renamed and refurbished as a new product to clear up some old mining hardware used by Bitmain in their mining farms in China instead of having to relocate it to a new place. This batch has a MOQ (minimum order quantity) of 5 units and all ordered quantities can only be multiples of 5 (10, 15, 20 units and so on) with the maximum number of units in a single order up to 300. The shipping for all confirmed orders will start after March 1st and payment accepted is only in Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and USD wire transfer.

Bitmain Antminer V9 Specifications:
– Product model: V9
– Hash chip type: BM1580
– Total quantity of hash chips: 135 PCS
– Total quantity of hash boards: 3 PCS
– Total hash rate: 4TH ±5%
– DC voltage input: 11.60~13.00 V
– DC current input @12V DC: 79.59 A +10%
– DC Power @12V DC input: 955 W +10%
– 220VAC Power @25℃, 93% conversion efficiency of APW3: 1027 W +10%
– 220VAC Power efficiency @25℃, 93% conversion efficiency of APW3: 253mJ/MH+10%
– Weight (without package）: 3.05 kg
– Operation temperature: 0-40 ℃
– Storage temperature: -40-85 ℃
– Operation humidity: 5%RH-95%RH, prevent condensation
– Noise: 76 dB
– Networking connection mode: Ethernet Cable
– Power connection mode: All three PCI-E ports are required to power the board. You can use one PSU to power multiple boards, but do not attempt to power one board with two PSUs.We suggest to prevent the control board to be powered up before hash boards be powered up.
– Size (Length*Width*Height, without package): 301mm*123mm*155mm

All in all not a very exciting new announcement of a new ASIC miner from Bitmain, efficiency wise the “new” hardware is disappointing for the performance it offers at the rated power usage. So it seems to be targeted at users looking for cheap hardware that have really cheap or even “free” power, otherwise it just does not seem economically reasonable to buy these miners at the moment.

Litecoin Cash (LCC) is an Upcoming SHA256 Fork of Litecoin

4 Feb
2018

If you just had enough of Bitcoin forks lately, then this might be of interest – an upcoming Litecoin fork called Litecoin Cash (LCC) is coming up shortly and it will be using SHA256 as mining algorithm among some other changes. The Litecoin Cash (LCash anyone?) will be forking at Litecoin block which should occur on or around February 19th, 2018 will have a 10:1 claim ratio for Litecoin (LTC) users holding their coins in a local wallet or a compatible exchange or service that will support LCC. The maximum LCC supply will also be 10 times higher at 840 Million and the block reward will also be 10 times higher than what Litecoin currently has, so 250 LCC per block. The target block time remains at 2.5 minute, though difficulty adjustment will be changed, LitecoinCash will be using Evan Duffield’s proven DarkGravity V3 algorithm from Dash to recalculate mining difficulty on every block. There will also be a a slow start for the mining so block rewards will start at 1.25 LCC and grow to 250 LCC over the first 400 blocks after the fork. Unfortunately there is also a mention of a premine, supposedly less than 1% of total money supply at fork time to be paid to a development fund (should be about 5.5 Million LCC). Some good places to trade the coin include HitBTC, Stex, Yobit.

The reason that the team behind Litecoin Cash (LCC) cites as choosing to switch to SHA256 proof-of-work algorithm for mining is that this should enable a new use for previously obsolete Bitcoin mining hardware. While that may be true it will also open up the doors to large mining farms using up to date Bitcoin mining hardware, so well… good luck with that if things pick up fast. The “small premine” is not small at all even at 1% considering that there are already 55 Million Litecoins in circulation (out of 84), so around 550 Million at forking time for LitecoinCash out of 840 Million. The 1% premine is 5.5 Million LCC or 550 Thousand LTC, looking at it this way certainly does not make it “small premine”, does it? So next up anyone else seeing Litecoin Gold or more likely Litecoin Silver with Equihash or another GPU friendly mining algorithm? Anyway, nobody holding LTC is going to refuse some free coins, just be careful and always transfer your Litecoin coins to a fresh address first before importing any private keys into LitecoinCash or any other fork wallet for that matter.

Here is how Charlie Lee (the creator of Litecoin) has comment on Twitter regarding LitecoinCash (LCC) and any other forks that use Litecoin as a part of their name, according to him “any forks that you hear about is a scam trying to confuse you to think it’s related to Litecoin”. It is up to you to decide for yourself should you support LitecoinCash (LCC) and/or any other forks that may come out bearing the name Litecoin something.

– For more information about the upcoming Litecoin Cash (LCC) fork of Litecoin (LTC)…

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