More Bitcoin Companies Not Applying for BitLicense

13 Aug
2015

ny-bitlicense

Some more Bitcoin and crypto currency oriented businesses have announced that they will not be applying for BitLicense and thus will stop offering their services to residents of the state of New York. These companies include the Bitcoin cloud mining service Genesis Mining:

Genesis Mining will not be able to comply with the regulations set forth by the proposed BitLicense and as such, we will no longer be able to accept customers from the state of New York. All current customers will be able to continue their services, but going forward, no one with an IP address from the state of New York will be able to purchase hashpower contracts with us.

Then there is also the LocalBitcoins, a service that connects people willing to sell and buy Bitcoins all over the world. Interestingly enough at the same time one of the biggest online Bitcoin wallet providers and payment processor service Coinbase has announced they will be applying for BitLicense. Applying for a BitLicense has two sides, one regarding the process itself that seems to be long and costly endeavor for the companies, and the other is the concern regarding the customer’s privacy and how it will be affected after a company complies with the BitLicense regulations.

Ethereum Mining Profitability Calculator

13 Aug
2015

ethereum-mining-profitability-calculator

If you are wondering if it is worth mining Ethereum you can get an idea on how much Ether (ETH) should be mined with a specific hashrate depending on what hardware you have available with a simple mining profitability calculator. All you have to enter is the hashrate you are getting (you can run ethminer in benchmark mode to see what hashrate to expect from your CPU or GPU if you have not yet started mining) and you will get information about the expected mined amount in ETH and USD. The calculator uses up to date data from etherchain’s API to get fresh information about the Network Hashrate, average Blocktime and 1 ETH price, so it should be pretty accurate with the results at the moment of time you use it. The estimated coins to be mined and their USD value are shown for a period of 1 Minute, 1 Hour, 1 Day, 1 Week and 1 Month, though the longer the period is the less accurate the estimation could be.

So for example if we have a single AMD Radeon R9 280X GPU available that is capable of producing around 24 MHS worth of hashrate when mining Ethereum and we enter that value in the calculator we are going to get an estimation of about 4.5 ETH mined in a day or a bit over $5 USD. This is making mining Ether on the Ethereum network a pretty good and profitable crypto currency to mine at the moment if the estimates are true. If you want you can check our Quick Guide on How to Mine Ethereum on Windows to get things started. The Ethereum Mining Profitability Calculator is pretty simple and dubbed as alpha software, but it works well, the code is written in Python and the source code is also available for anyone interested.

– To check out what to expect via the Ethereum Mining Profitability Calculator…

Quick Guide on How to Mine Ethereum on Windows

12 Aug
2015

ethminer-cuda-pool

Ethereum launched Frontier – the first release of the project including actual mining of Ether with CPU and GPU at the end of last month. The Frontier release comes with a command line only interface with a Javascript environment that allows building, testing, deploying and using decentralized applications on the Ethereum blockchain. Ethereum is being described as a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference. So far the available code is mostly intended for developers and though the network is active it is not very user friendly to normal people that might be interested in trying to mine some Ether. Ethereum’s next release named Homestead is supposed to offer in a few months a user friendly interface for normal users.

We have prepared a short guide that should get you started with Ethereum mining using the Frontier release on Windows and we have prepared the required software to create your own address as well as how you can mine solo or in a mining pool using either your CPU or GPU (OpenCL or CUDA). We want to warn you that although getting started with the basic usage and mining may not be that hard, to be able to take advantage of all of Ethereum’s features you’d need to spend some more time getting to know it as it things are not like with your average Bitcoin clone. We are going to be using geth (source), ethminer (source) and ethminer-cuda (source), you can download the package containing the Windows binaries for both from the link below then you need to follow the following instructions:

Generating wallet address:
– Open the geth folder and run geth-console.bat to start Ethereum in console mode
– The software will need to download the blockchain data, it can take some time
– In the console type: personal.newAccount("password")
– Instead of password in the quotes above write your own password and remember it well
– In the console type: eth.accounts
– This will list your Ethereum wallet address
– To check your account balance you can type: web3.fromWei(eth.getBalance(eth.coinbase), "ether")

Sending Ether to another wallet:
– First you need to unlock your account by typing in the console the following (replace password with your password): personal.unlockAccount(eth.accounts[0], "password")
– In the console type: eth.sendTransaction({from: 'your_address', to: 'recipient_address', value: web3.toWei(1, "ether")})
– In the above code replace your_address and recipient_address with the respective addresses, the example is for sending 1 Ether, but you can change the value depending on your needs

Mining locally on the CPU:
– Run geth-console.bat and to start CPU mining type: miner.start(4)
– The number in the quotes is the number of threads to use
– To stop CPU mining locally type: miner.stop()

Pool CPU/GPU mining using ethminer:
– Open the ethminer folder and edit the three bat files with your wallet address
– For CPU mining on the pool run: pool-cpu.bat
– For OpenCL mining on the pool run: pool-ocl.bat
– For CUDA mining on the pool run: pool-cuda.bat

The ethminer software uses the ethpool mining pool for mining, the pool fee is 2% and there is a flat fee of 0.01 Ether per payout charged with minimum payout of 1 Ether, also the pool is beta and there could be some issues. The geth software contains only CPU miner while ethminer supports CPU (up to about 2 times faster than geth CPU mining), OpenCL GPU mining for AMD (also works on Nvidia) and CUDA GPU mining. You can use OpenCL mining on Nvidia GPUs as well, could work on older GPUs that do not work with the CUDA miner. If you have integrated GPU it can also be detected as OpenCL capable and the miner may try to run on it, so you can try to use the --opencl-platform and --opencl-device command line parameters to avoid the problem.

Mining performance:
– ethminer CPU mining on Intel Core i7 5820K: 0.95 MHS
– ethminer OpenCL mining on AMD Radeon R9 280X: 24.4 MHS
– ethminer OpenCL mining on Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti: 18.5 MHS
– ethminer CUDA mining on Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti: 18.7 MHS

Do note that ethminer is 64-bit only and you need to have Visual C++ 2013 Redistributable installed (the 64-bit version) as it is compiled with Visual Studio 2013 and CUDA 7.5RC. Note that it seems AMD is currently faster mining Ethereum as compared to Nvidia GPUs and CPU mining is not much worth other than for testing purposes anyway.

– Download geth and ethminer compiled for Windows and ready to be used…

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