Crypto Mining Blog
It Is All About BTC, LTC, ETH, DOGE, KAS mining as well as other alternative crypto currencies
Search
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…
- Published in: Crypto Coins
- Related tags: Bgold, Bitcoin fork, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Gold Equihash, Bitcoin Gold GPU mining, Bitcoin Gold mining, BTC fork, BTG, Equihash
Innosilicon has put up for pre-order their new A4+ LTCMaster Scrypt ASIC that should be capable of delivering 620 MHS hashrate with 750W ot power usage according to the official information. This is an update from last year’s Innosilicon A4 Dominator Scrypt ASIC whih was capable of only about 280 MHS and had higher power usage, so a nice improvement for sure. The new Innosilicon A4+ LTCMaster is available for pre-order at a price of $3200 USD (60.355 LTC, 0.631415 BTC) with delivery scheduled for November 30th to December 10th for the current batch. The price is only for the miner with a minimum order quantity of 3 devices and Innosilicon also has offers available with a 1050W 110V PSU or 1600W 220V PSU, depending on the region you live in and the electric network you use. Payments can be made via LTC, BTC or Bank Transfer, there is 6 months warranty and shipping is only with DHL.
INNOSILICON A4+ LTCMaster Specifications:
– Hashrate: 620 Mh/s (+-8% performance, can be over-clocked at user’s risk)
– Power Consumption: 750W (+/-8%, normal mode, at the wall, with 93% efficiency PSU, 25°C temperature )
– ASIC chips: 288 pcs
– Size: (L)350mm*(W)125mm*(H)155mm
– Gross weight: net weight 3.83 KG (without PSU)
– Required rated PSU: 1000W or above, 8 * PCI-E 6-Pin
– Power supply connection: 2 PCIE port per power board (4 boards)
– Cooling: air-cooled with 2 fans
– Internet connection: Ethernet
– Check out the official Innosilicon website for more details on the A4+ LTCMaster Scrypt ASIC…
The dstm’s ZCash Nvidia miner has been available for a while and we’ve been keeping a track, but it was only for Linux operating systems – not anymore. With the latest version 0.5.2 the miner is also released for Windows in a 64-bit binary and not anymore available only for Linux miners. The miner is closed source one and comes with a 2% developer fee included. It support Nvidia-based GPUs with Compute Capability 5.0 or later, meaning it is for Maxwell or the newer Pascal video cards. There is support available for stratum as well as for NiceHash extranonce, so it can be used there as well without problems for selling Equihash hashrate.
The dstm’s ZCash Nvidia Miner is supposed to be slightly faster than the popular and widely used EWBF’s CUDA Zcash miner that has not been updated for quite some time, so you might want to give the new miner a try. Our initial tests show a bit better hashrate with the same GPU settings as with the EWBF, though the difference is not huge. Do note that dstm’s miner has its own specifics that you need to get used with such as the use of a separate thread for each GPU and getting 6 separate workers on the pool from one mining rig for example. The interface could also use some improvements and some color coding can further help in readability, but in general it is quite Ok even at the moment. Do note that the 64-bit Windows binary is built with Visual Studio 2015, so if you do not have the Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015 installed you might get an error about a missing DLL.
– If you want to check out the dstm’s ZCash Cuda miner available for Linux and Windows (64-bit only)…