AMD Radeon VEGA 56 Doing 1800 H/s XMR at 160W Power Usage

22 Sep
2017

It seems that the new AMD Radeon VEGA GPUs are starting to show some potential for mining, giving high performance at not so high power usage. VEGA 56 seems to be doing better as far as mining goes as it is already optimized for lower power consumption and not pushed too much in terms of operating voltage to reach higher GPU frequency, and it comes cheaper to buy and these are often two of the most important thing when talking about GPUs for mining anyway. People are already pushing the Radeon VEGA 56 over 1800 H/s for Monero (XMR) mining with a power usage of just about 160W per GPU.

This is possible using the XMR-STACK miner with 2 threads along with the AMD Beta Blockchain drivers and with HBCC on. Reducing the GPU frequency with 30% and the power limit with 20% and setting HBM memory at 950. Though apparently this requires a lot of memory per card at the moment and may be a bit unstable at times and not so user friendly as you still have to rely on Wattman for the GPU settings from within the driver. It is definitely showing a good potential for the VEGA GPUs.

– For more information about the optimized Radeon VEGA 56 settings for Monero (XMR) mining…

CoinHive, a Monero (XMR) Crypto Miner for Your Website

19 Sep
2017

Recently we have introduced to you JSEcoin – JavaScript Embeded Cryptocurrency for Webmasters as an interesting new project that uses JavaScript mining via the browser of users and that can be used to monetize website traffic. But another similar service has gotten much more attention lately as it was found to be used on The Pirate Bay (a torrent website) in the form of an embedded JS miner for Monero (XMR). The service in question is Coin Hive and it allows you users to embed JavaScript miners in their website as a side source of revenue, so the service in itself is not bad or evil or whatever. The problem with The Pirate Bay is that they have introduced the JavaScript code of the miner without letting any of the visitors know, so people started noticing that when they open the website their CPU load skyrockets and that is not fine.

The main problem we are seeing here with a service like that is when users don’t know that you are using their computing resources to mine, you need to tell them or offer them the choice to do it in order to support the website. The default example from Coin Hive does not come with any visual user interface or anything to let the users know there is a miner, but what if you give your visitors a link to click that will open up a page with a miner. They would be able to open up and control the miner as well as monitor it and have that page open and the miner running in order to support the website or the community they are a part of with their computing power. It is an interesting idea and a one that might actually work out well for some people, the problem however is that most of the users would be thinking along the way of abusing a service like that and making profit at the expense of some users. Still, if you find the project interesting and useful you might look into it, just make sure you tell your visitors what you are doing if you embed it on a website in order not to have negative, instead of positive results!

Apart from the embeddable web-based miner using JavaScript the CoinHive service offers some other interesting alternatives to more traditional services such as a Proof of Work Shortlinks service as well as Proof of Work Captcha. Both of these user actual mining of a certain number of hashes before allowing you to forward you to a certain link or to confirm that you are a human and not a bot. Using Proof of Work (mining) for more common things that normally utilize different approaches can actually be a interesting way to improve and yet at the same time monetize some aspects from an already working service. In short you might want to think outside of the box and think of new ways to use crypto mining in a way that you may even reward users for doing the “heavy lifting” in an existing web-based game or a social network for example. Of course computing hashes in a browser with JavaScript is not the most efficient way to do things, especially compared to optimized mining software. We have played around with the miner and the extra PoW-based services available, though do note that we have not embedded this miner into the website here and we would not do it without warning you should we decide to test it live for example.

– For more details and to check out the CoinHive JavaScript web-based Monero (XMR) miner…

Do You Notice That it is All About ICOs Lately

18 Sep
2017

The craze for ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) seems to be going on and instead of things starting to calm down things are actually getting more and more intense, regardless of the news that some countries may be banning them or regulating them. Nowadays all we pretty much see in our sidebar with ads, provided mostly by Google, is pretty much all about ICOs and nothing more. We are also being contacted on a daily basis by a lot of people that are willing to advertise their upcoming or already running ICO or just do a coverage. We are not big fans of Initial Coin Offerings ourselves and writing about them or even directly advertising kind of means that we either approve or endorse them or at least this is what most people will think even if that is not our intention. We have been covering some ICOs in the past, just a few actually, as giving investment advice for ICOs especially has never been the idea or goal of this website. If we see a good idea and want to help promote the project and actually use the service or product that will or is being made directly as a result of an ICO we are going to share that information anyway. In such cases we are even investing something in that particular ICO ourselves, this is how much we believe in the idea. Even then however you should not threat that as an investment advice, you should still do your own research as we may not always be right on the spot…

With all of the above said our team does not track any or all ICOs that are currently appearing, starting or ending, they are quite a lot actually and if you do not specialize on that topic alone it will be hard to cover it all. We are not investors or traders and we do not give investment or trading advice, even if we do both of these as well from time to time. We are not against ICOs as a concept, in fact we have recently taken a part of such a project ourselves – Cryptum, a project that is developing a crypto mining board game among other things, though our interest was caught by that particular side of the project. It is not an ICO that promises great things such as decentralizing the board game business or putting board games on a blockchain, it has much more reasonable goals and a business plan that actually seems quite reasonable. Taking a part in that particular project has allowed us to get a pretty good insight on how things work inside an ICO and how many people try to make profit from such projects, not caring at all about the actual product or service (the ugly side of the business).

You are still welcome to contact us if you are running an ICO, planning to start one, or have even finished such a project. We would gladly check it out if we find it interesting and may even do a coverage here, but don’t just say you want to promote an ICO and you are contacting us for advertisement rates. If you are not able to explain what your project is about in just a few sentences in an understandable way, then don’t even bother writing to us. If you cannot do at least that, then maybe you should not be running an ICO at all… just repeating a couple of keywords such as decentralizing and putting whatever it is on the blockchain all the time probably would work for some people, but not for us. If you cannot explain your idea quickly and easily, then don’t even bother trying to!

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