The First HOdlcoin Mining Pool is Now Available

26 Mar
2016

hodlminer-cpu-miner

We have recently covered HOdlcoin (HODL) as an interesting new altcoin. For the moment HODL is only CPU mineable and you could only mine it solo with the wallet, but the first mining pool is now available with a dedicated hodlminer CPU miner (source). The miner supports Stratum and you can control how many CPU cores you want to utilize to mine HODL, however at this point it does seem to be slower than the built in CPU ‌mining in the wallet. With hodlminer we are getting just about 1/4th of the hashrate we get in the wallet or just about 45-50 H/s as compared to about 200 Hashes per second in the wallet (under Windows 7) using an Intel Core i7 5820K CPU (6 cores – 12 threads). So you might want to wait for a more optimized miner to become available and keep solo mining for the moment in order to have higher hashrate available. Using pool mining does provide lower rewards per block, but also should ensure stable and more predictable mining income, unlike when solo mining at this already pretty high difficulty where luck plays a lot of role in how much you will make.

Update: New faster version of the miner is now available that should provide slightly higher hashrate than what you are getting using the wallet miner, increase should be something like 10-20% or more, but it can vary, so you need to test and compare. Just download the updated binary and try on your CPU and feel free to post result in the comments below.

– To download and try the hodlminer CPU miner for pool mining HODL coins on Windows…

What Features are Missing from the iBeLink DM384M X11 ASIC Miner

25 Mar
2016

ibelink-dm384m-2

The iBeLink DM384M is the first to market X11 ASIC miner and while it is a pretty good product, there are still some things to be desired. In terms of hardware the X11 ASIC miner offers a solid build and reliable performance making it pretty capable for mining in a data center even in not so favorable conditions even when the environment temperature is not the best. The power usage is at a good level for the high performance it offers of 384 MHS for X11 mining, but the noise level makes it inappropriate for home miners. Temperature wise the situation is good thanks to the powerful server grade cooling used to keep the miner operating stable as you can see from these thermal images of the device in operation. Pretty much what is missing in terms of hardware is the presence of thermal sensors and fan control available for the users, the first is not hard to implement considering that the built-in controller of the miner is a Raspberry Pi. Fan speed control and failsafe could be trickier to implement as it would also need to be able to ignore users settings if the conditions require it and even to shutdown the miner in case a fan fails. Not to mention that implementing fan speed control and monitoring would not be very usable without the miner having thermal sensors, but the current implementation with server grade fans is good enough and should provide long and reliable operating with adequate cooling.

ibelink-pool-control-software

On the software side however there is much more to be desired, even though the basic web-based functionality you get is a pretty good starting point. we have already mentioned the device uses a Raspberry Pi controller with a modified version of the MineNinja software to provide a web-based frontend to the cgminer 3.5.6 backend. The web frontend provides a lot of numbers to the users, but they do not always seem to be correct, especially in terms of the actual hashrate you are getting from the device, so you need to look at the pool reported speed. Furthermore the web-based control lacks some very basic features such as password protection for access control or the ability to use a different pool mining strategy than the default failsafe one that is available. With big and powerful ASIC miners we often see that the web-based control software offers only pool failsafe options, but no load balance strategy for example. So while this will be fine if you are mining a high difficulty coin, if you go for a low difficulty and hashrate one throwing your full hashrate you will quickly raise the coin difficulty a lot. The cgminer backend does come with support for different pool strategies, so the problem is in the functionality available in web-based interface. Unfortunately for the moment the source code of cgminer or at lest the driver for the device is not yet publicly released, so we cannot have support built in other miners and web frontends. So for the moment the iBeLink DM384M is best for use with high difficulty X11 coins…

Interest and Price of Influxcoin (INFX) is Rising Rapidly

24 Mar
2016

influxcoin-infx-profit

Influxcoin (INFX) is apparently today’s big hit in the world of altcoins as the interest and the exchange rate of the coin has exploded. The reason for the peak is the official announcement that the Microsoft has added the project in their continuing expansion of Azure’s Blockchain as a Service. Other coins that have been added today include Expanse (EXP), a project that was forked from Ethereum, Monero (XMR) and Radium (RADS). Influxcoin (INFX) is currently the most profitable X11-based altcoin to mine, so owners of iBeLink X11 ASIC miners might be interested in it, though larger scale X11 GPU miners might want to check it out as well. EXP, XMR and RADS are also gaining in terms of exchange rate, so worth keeping an eye on them as well, but INFX has shown the highest growth among the newly announced coins supported by Microsoft’s Azure.

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