The Second Bitcoin Block Reward Halving is Upon Us

6 Jul
2016

bitcoinhalvening

The second Bitcoin block reward halving is going to happen in a bit less than 3 days from now with a little over 400 blocks remaining. The amount of Bitcoins rewarded for each block decreases over time, getting halved once every 210000 blocks (approximately every four years). When Bitcoin was created in 2009, the initial block reward was 50 BTC, then in November 2012, it dropped to 25 BTC after the first halving. As a result of the block reward getting reduced once more in a few days finding a new Bitcoin block will start rewarding the miner that found it with just 12.5 BTC instead of 25 BTC like it is still at the moment. Following this development in 4 more years or sometime in 2020 the next Bitcoin block reward halving is expected to take place further reducing the block reward in half to just 6.25 BTC and so on. This will continue until the total limit of 21 million Bictoins are mined, though this will take quite a lot of years. The total number of BTC after the halving of the block reward should be about 15 Million and 750 Thousands out of the 21 Million total and with the continuing reduction of the reward over time the remaining over 5 Million of coins will take years and years and more halvings to be mined (estimated time is around 2140).

– One more useful website dedicated to tracking the Bitcoin block reward halving…

Updated ccMiner 1.8-dev fork by tpruvot With Faster Lyra2REv2 and Decred

5 Jul
2016

ccminer-1-8-dev-tpruvot

Here is another quick update of the ccMiner fork by tpruvot with a new Windows binary we have compiled from the latest ccMiner 1.8-dev (source) that comes with improved hashrate for Lyra2REv2 thanks to the Nanashi Meiyo-Meijin improvements as well as faster Decred hashrate thanks to Alexis Provos improvements getting integrated. There are some other fixes and some new features using nvapi, this release also includes support for the X11 Evo algorithm, so you might want to give it a try if you are currently using different forks of ccMiner for different algorithms. The Windows binary is a 32-bit one compiled with CUDA 6.5 and with support for Compute 2.0 to Compute 5.2 Nvidia GPUs and will also work on the newer Pascal Nvidia GPUs even though it is not CUDA 8.0 binary. So do give it a try if you are GPU mining anything other than Ethereum on your Nvidia GPUs at the moment…

– To download the latest ccMiner version 1.8-dev by tpruvot with better hashrates for Lyra2REv2 and Decred…

Performance of the AMD Radeon RX 480 for Other Algorithms

4 Jul
2016

amd-radeon-rx-480-nicehash

We have already covered the performance of the new AMD Radeon RX 480 GPUs for mining Ethereum, so it is time to see how the GPU performs with other popular algorithms. We have already mentioned that the RX 480 apparently has some issues running sgminer (at least under Windows), so we were not able to run tests with many of the currently popular algorithms, but it seems that many people missed that part. The good news is that there is now an updated version of the NiceHash Miner that apparently adds support for GTX 1070/1080 and RX 480. So we have downloaded it and ran the built in benchmark and you can see the results above as well as the fact that some algorithms still have issues apparently hence the 0 MHS results, but it is much better than before. We have noticed that the sgminer that is being packaged and used for RX 480 now has some pre-built binaries for Ellesmere (RX 480) included. So even if you are not planning on using the NiceHash Miner on Windows, you still might get the sgminer-5-4-0-general from the bin folder and use it on Radeon RX 480.

amd-radeon-rx-480-vs-gtx-1070-970

Here is a chart comparing the performance of a reference design AMD Radeon RX 480 from ASUS in the other algorithms apart from Ethereum to an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970, namely a Gigabyte WindForce OC model and a reference design Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 from ASUS. The benchmark did not produce results for NeoScrypt, WhirlpoolX and Blake256r14 as you can see, so it seems that some algorithms may still have issues running on RX 480. Also do note that the RX 480 has been around for just a few days, so there have not been any specific optimizations for the new Polaris architecture that it uses and further performance increases might be possible. The X11 Evo algorithm is not yet supported by the sgminer for of NiceHash, so there are no results as the dedicated miner is having trouble runnign on the RX 480 on Windows (we have not yet tried Linux).

The pleasant surprises are in Blakecoin and the X-based algorithms where the result of the RX 480 beats with a bit what the GTX 970 manages to provide in terms of hashrate. Unfortunately in the others the GTX 970 turns out faster than the RX 480 for the moment and the AMD card can definitely use some improvements in algorithms such as Lyra2REv2 and Quark for example. The GTX 1070 however manages to provide a significantly higher hashrate compared to the RX 480 and with a lower power usage than the AMD card. Again the RX 480 could get some tweaks and fixes and it definitely needs some and will most likely manage to catch up to the GTX 970, but reaching the GTX 1070 is probably too much to expect.

We should not forget that the GTX 1070 is a significantly more expensive GPU than what the AMD Radeon RX 480 sells for, but still we did not expect doubled or almost doubled hashrate provided by the GTX 1070 in most algorithms. It seems that the benchmark results we get for crypto mining and the ones when using the RX 480 for gaming are pretty much the same (apart from memory intensive mining algos such as Ethereum) where the new AMD card manages to be on par or a bit faster than a GTX 970 in some of the cases.

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