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The Block Erupter Cube Bitcoin ASICs are the latest products (though already a few months old) to come out from the company ASICMiner – the same company that made the small USB sticks for mining Bitcoins. These ASIC devices are capable of 32 to 38 GHS (stock and overclocked) and come with a small form factor, but with a relatively high power consumption to be good choice to continue mining for much longer. We got our hands on one of these devices and decided to check it out and report some interesting things we’ve found out about it and that you will probably not find anywhere else. Like for example the thermal images of the miner in action that you can see above that give interesting insight into the operation of the miner. You can see that inside of the device can get pretty hot, while the outside aluminum case remains pretty cool, so the cooling is apparently quite effective in moving air through the chips to keep them operating problem free even when overclocked, even though the chips temperature can go as high as 80 degrees Celsius. Another interesting finding is that the safety fuse on the back of the device can get pretty hot, so e careful with the fuse while the device is working.
The inside of the Block Erupter Cube Bitcoin ASIC consists of a main control board and six modules with chips, each of the boards with chips has 16 chips and the total number of chips inside the device is 96. These are the same chips that are found on the Block Erupter USB devices, so they are not very power efficient nowadays as compared to other alternative solutions available. As you can see the idle power consumption of the ASICMiner Block Erupter Cube is 130W and having the device overclocked to run at 38 GHS the power consumption can go up to about 350W (measured at the power outlet). The high power consumption is with the relatively low hashrate already is what is making these a bit outdated and in a few more jumps in the Bitcoin difficulty.
The Block Erupter Cube devices comes with a built-in web management interface that also allows you to switch between the normal and overclocked operation mode with a click of a button. The web interface lets you enter the pool settings, so the device can operate without the need of a computer, however it only supports getwork and not stratum. And with stratum pools you need to use a stratum proxy in order to be able to connect to a stratum pool and that needs to be installed on a computer. We have managed to get about 37 GHS stable hashrate from the unit we have tested in the overclocked state and it was running stable and reliable for the whole week of testing that we did. And while the Block Erupter Cube ASIC miners do have some specifics, they do look nice and well built and already can be found quite cheap, pretty soon there will no be much point in mining for Bitcoins with them, unless you don’t pay for the electricity used. So do not get very tempted by a too attractive price for a Cube miner and better consider another ASIC alternative for mining Bitcoins that provides higher hashrate and uses less power.
If you are mining Scrypt crypto currencies such as Litecoin or maybe DOGE, then you are most likely using cgminer as a mining software or something that relies on cgminer as a backend. The author of cgminer (Con Kolivas) however seems to have decided to continue support of cgminer only for ASIC mining for SHA-256 cryptos such as Bitcoin and version 3.7.2 is the last one for cgminer to support GPU mining for scrypt crypto coins. Furthermore the windows version of the last cgminer to support GPU mining has been removed from the official download location, you can however download cgminer 3.7.2 with GPU support for windows here.
More importantly, there are already some alternatives that are based around the original source code of cgminer 3.7.2, but add extra features and offer improvements that are not found in the original software. One such version based on cgminer 3.7.2 is Martin “Kalroth” Danielsen’s cgminer 3.7.2 that he calls cgminer 3.7.3 in order for the users to be able to differentiate between the original and his version. In cgminer 3.7.2 kalroth (cgminer 3.7.3) he has made changes to the visual interface to make it more user friendly and functionality that can help you squeeze a bit more performance out of your GPU mining hardware. Some of the notable differences include support for multiple pool load balancing, implementation for idle state for GPUs when there’s no work, two additional modes for controlling intensity – xintensity and rawintensity for additional performance, faster failover pool switching back delay and interface improvements such as uptime status or percentage of rejected shares and so on. Definitely something to try and see if you like this version of cgminer better than the original 3.7.2.
– You can download cgminer 3.7.3 karloth with GPU mining support for Windows OS here…
- In: Mining Software
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We have found another interesting mobile-oriented crypto project called MIB Coin (MIB) where everything is done with a smartphone including mining of MIB coins, so we had to give it a try.
MIB stands for Mobile Integrated Blockchain, a mobile blockchain where coins can be mined with a regular Android or iOS-based smartphone via a dedicated application. The project comes form Asia with apparently strong interest in Korea and China, and it seems that not that much interest from the rest of the world for the moment. The MIB coin is traded on Probit, a Korean exchange, as well as CoinBene, a Chinese one with a daily volume of less than 2 BTC at the moment and total market capitalization of about 50. According to CoinMarketCap at the moment for writing this MIB Coin (MIB) is ranked at 1113th place in terms of Market capitalization. The interesting thing here is that the mining can only be done on smartphone, unlike most other similar projects that may have a more efficient mobile miner, but can also be mined on CPU or even GPU with much higher speed, for MIB Coin there are only Android and Apple iPhone miners available.
We have downloaded and tried the MIB Miner Android application, there is one also for Apple iOS smartphones with both not available on the official Application Stores, you need to download and install manually from the official MIB website. On the left of the image above you can see the regular MIB Miner and on the right the MIB Miner Controller application designed for smartphone mining farms apparently. The miner itself requires you to register and generate a wallet address for mining, the mining part of the software is pretty basic and user friendly, no advanced options available. You only select the pool (the default one does not seem to work apparently, but there is a list to choose from) and the load that the miner will have on the smartphone. It seems that the miner may not be very demanding and can be used on battery without performance loss, though it stops mining if the app loses focus, so you must use your phone for mining exclusively.
You will also need to install a Wallet app and not just the mining one, as although the miner can generate a wallet for you, you do not have control for sending or even monitoring the amount of mined coins. Having everything in a single app might’ve been easier for the user in our opinion. We are not sure how things are regarding any monitoring or fail-safe on the hardware status of the smartphone you use for mining such as temperature monitoring to prevent overheating that will stop mining immediately for instance. So far the best we have seen i terms of a mobile mining software is the one from Scala (XLA) and it would be great if other projects can look into the mining software this crypto project has.
– For more information you can check out the official MIB Coin (MIB) website…