AlphaPool is Yet Another New Mining Pool for Ethereum

24 Aug
2015

alphapool-ethereum-mining-pool

AlphaPool is a new mining pool for mining Ethereum’s Ether (ETH) coins that has just been launched today, bringing the total number of active pools to 5. While it is never a bad thing to have a choice between multiple mining pools, a few days ago there was just one – Ethpool and when it stopped accepting new miners people had to go solo until new pools started appearing. We are still yet to see someone release open source code for a mining pool for Ethereum however. But back to AlphaPool, it promises some nice things to miners, that is why competition is good, no transaction fee and 0% pool fee for the first week then just 1%, there is also no mention of a minimum amount of Ether to be mined before a payout. One drawback however, there is no option for users to set their miner’s hashrate (difficulty) through the miner which can make it pointless for low hashrate miners to try mining at the pool as they may not be able to get much shares solved and submitted. Since this is a brand new pool there are not much miners on it yet, so it may take a bit more time before enough people gather for blocks to start getting solved.

Getting started with AlphaPool:
ethminer -F http://alphaminer.xyz:8080?miner=0x683feddafc2a8542744a4587de0c45626d7b8e68 -G

The above command line is an example you can use to get started mining with ethminer at AlphaPool, you just need to replace the wallet address with your own Ethereum wallet and you are ready to go. Do note that the URL of the pool and the mining address for it are slightly different. The above line is for mining using the OpenCL version of ethminer, for using the CUDA fork you need to replace the parameter -G with -U and you should be ready to go. As already mentioned there is no user set variable to allow for setting up the miner hashrate (difficulty) through the ethminer command line. If you are new to Ethereum you might want to first check out our Quick Guide on How to Mine Ethereum on Windows as a good starting point.

– To check out the new Ethereum mining pool called AlphaPool that was just launched…

WeiPool, One More New Mining Pool for Ethereum

24 Aug
2015

weipool-new-ethereum-mining-pool

It seems that there is another new mining pool foe Ethereum’s Ether (ETH) coins that has just launched. The new pool is called Weipool and offers a simple web-based user interface for mining Ether coins with the help of ethminer, you can use our Quick Guide on How to Mine Ethereum on Windows, if you are still new to Ethereum. The new pool does not yet have a lot of miners and it is supposed to do payouts every 12 hours if your balance is more than 1 Ether, with 0.01 Ether tx fee and currently 0% pool fee for the first week (1.5% fee after that). Since it is a new pool it may take a while for miners to gather and for the first blocks to get solved, so be careful and do have in mind what happened with Pooleum – a new Ethereum pool that seems to have completely disappeared now. The Weipool does have user controllable hashrate (difficulty) setting, so it should be suitable for miners with lower hashrate.

Getting started with Weipool:
ethminer -F http://mine.weipool.org:5555/0x683feddafc2a8542744a4587de0c45626d7b8e68/20 -G

The above command line is an example you can use to get started mining with ethminer at Weipool, you just need to replace the wallet address with your own Ethereum wallet and the default hashrate value of 20 (suitable for a single high-end GPU such as Radeon 280X) to the respective hashrate of your mining rig and you are ready to go. The above line is for mining using the OpenCL version of ethminer, for using the CUDA fork you need to replace the parameter -G with -U and you should be ready to go.

– To check out the new Ethereum mining pool called Weipool that was just launched…

Litecoin Block Reward Halving Countdown

23 Aug
2015

litecoin-block-reward-halving-countdown

There are just about two more days left before the first Litecoin (LTC) block reward halving occurs, this should happen sometime on Tuesday, August 25th. Litecoin’s block mining reward halves every 840000 blocks or roughly in 4 years, and we are going to see the first halving that will bring the coin reward down to 25 coins from the current reward of 50 coins. The total Litecoins mined when the first block reward halving occurs will be 42 million and for the next 4 years before the next halving occurs there will be 21 millions more LTC mined. The question how will the halving affect Litecoin (LTC) and especially the price of the alternative crypto currency is the one that miners are continuing to be asking as the day approaches. If you want to keep a track of when exactly the Litecoin block reward halving will occur, then you should know that there is a countdown on a dedicated website just for that available.

– To visit the dedicated Litecoin Block Reward Halving Countdown website…

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