Using the Coin Control Feature of Your GUI Qt Wallet

23 Apr
2016

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Taking advantage of the Coin Control feature is something considered a bit more advanced, especially if you don’t have built-in support in the specific crypto currency’s GUI Qt wallet and have to use the console. But Bitcoin and many of the more recent altcoins or ones with updated wallets do have built-in support making things easy to use the coin control feature right from the GUI. By default the feature is not enabled, so you will have to go to Settings / Options / Display and enable the coin control feature to be displayed. After that when you go to the Send coins panel of your coin wallet you will see a button to call the Coin Control feature, but what is this feature and why do you need to use it in the first place?

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The coin control feature allows you to control how you spend the coins in your wallet when sending a transaction. You can choose what addresses will be the ones sending the coins and which of the coins you have received will be used. With this feature you can do things like combine multiple transactions and the coins from them that you have received in a single large sum of coins available to one of you wallet addresses. To do that you can just select which coins and the address you want them sent to and use on of your own wallet addresses, so you will actually be sending yourself the coins. Sending yourself coins would require you to pay a network transaction fee, but by consolidating multiple small amounts of coins into single ones you can actually reduce on further transaction costs.

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The coin control feature however is more important for PoS (Proof of Stake) coins and altcoins that do have some other forms of awarding users with extra coins for holding some amount in their wallets. Consolidating the coins in your wallet will mean that they will available for stating altogether giving you bigger weight on the staking, so you should be able to save on time when staking coins. If a coin is rewarding you for keeping your coins in the wallet for some time, but there is a maximum time they need to stay in the wallet without moving you can use the coin control feature to see when you need to resend some of the coins back to your own wallet in order to keep getting rewards. So depending on the specific coin taking advantage of the coin control feature might help you maximize your PoS earnings, get more rewards or execute transactions with the coins you want from the address you want them to be sent. If you still haven’t used that feature you might want to give it a try and see how easy it is to use it especially if it is already available in your GUI qt wallet and you just need to enable it and not having to run console commands.

Check Profitability with the HOdlcoin (HODL) Mining Calculator

22 Apr
2016

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There is now a mining calculator available for HOdlcoin (HODL) our current favorite for a CPU-only mineable crypto coin. The calculator makes it easy to get a good idea on how much you might be able to earn using your CPU for mining the coin. The calculator gives you only information about what you can mine, but your profit can increase significantly thanks to the interest you get and if you deposit the coins for a term, taking advantage of the still quite high interest rate. Another interesting new feature with HODL is the recent introduction of a custom HOdlcoin block explorer that gives interesting and useful information on how things are moving with the coin and its network, so do check that out as well.

– To check your mining profitability with the HOdlcoin (HODL) mining calculator…

Updated Claymore Dual Ethereum and Decred Miner for AMD GPUs

21 Apr
2016

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Claymore has been quite active in further developing his dual miner for AMD OpenCL GPUs intended to mine both Ethereum (ETH) and Decred (DCR) since our initial post about his first release a few days ago. The latest updates include some of the features we noted as missing in the initial release such as Stratum support for Decred or the ability to set workers for Ethereum mining pools. The more interesting improvements however are those relates to the performance you get from the miner, he has been able to squeeze some extra performance in terms of the hashrate you get for mining Ethereum while at the same time you still get decent performance for mining Decred as well.

The earlier versions showed a bit of a decrease of the performance in Ethereum while using the dual mining mode, but the latest improvements have significantly improved the situation, including the results for slower AMD GPUs. With the latest version 3+ you can get slightly more Ethereum mining hashrate than with the regular ethminer while at the same time you are also mining some Decred. The higher-end the AMD GPU you are using, the higher performance gain you can expect – from about 1 MHS on 79×0/280x cards to a few on 290/390 series of cards plus the extra Decred mining hashrate. Interestingly enough not mining in dual mode, but only Ethereum is not showing difference in the hashrate now on a Radeon R9 280X for example.

So if you still have not tried the Claymore Dual Ethereum and Decred Miner for AMD GPUs (it does not work on Nvidia video cards), you should give it a try. Do note that although this miner is free-to-use, there is a small developer fee of 1% for Ethereum-only mining mode and 2% for Ethereum plus Decred mining mode, so every hour the miner mines Ethereum for 36 or 72 seconds for developer. Also, if you have been mining only Ethereum for the moment and you switch do dual mining mode adding Decred you should know that the power usage and the heat generated by the GPU will increase. So make sure your AMD GPU mining rig can handle the extra power usage and heat generated when dual mining, because Ethereum is less power hungry and more memory than GPU demanding algorithm while the situation with Decred is the right opposite and thus both can be mined together with pretty good results. Another important thing to note is that the miner is only released as a Windows binary, no source code or binaries for other operating systems are currently available.

– Visit the official miner announcement thread for additional details and downloads…

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