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Making your own solution for restarting a mining rig that has frozen is relatively simple for pretty much anyone, you just need a Raspberry Pi board and a couple of 5V relay boards and you can be up and running in no time. You can use the base RPi operating system and with the help of WiringPi you can get easy control of the GPIO pins of the Pi, even direct console one with the GPIO utility. Of course you can install a web server with some basic visual interface as well, simple buttons to drive on/off the relays connected to the GPIO pins of the Pi board.
If you have a spare Raspberry Pi 3 you have up to 28 channels available to drive on/off relays, though based on our experience only 25 of the GPIO puns are actually reliable usable. Pins 2, 3 and 14 have a bit of erratic behavior being in high (triggered state) when the Pi board boots up or temporary switching on and then off when rebooting the board, so it is wise to skip them. Another possible issue is the GPIO pin 0 (the bottom white one) as using zeroes can be tricky when programming something, so be careful with that one as well. We have been using the relays to short the on/off button on the motherboard forcing the mining rig to shut down and then start up again. This works surprisingly well and you avoid the need to work with the high 110V/220V mains power going through the relays that can cause problems for not so experienced users. Our latest setup relies on driving 18 rigs though a single RPi 3 board, so we have a couple of spare channels available for extending the functionality of the controller further if we need to.
So if you are looking for relatively cheap way to get remote control over the power of more mining rigs that are not easily rebootable otherwise you might want to start playing with Raspberry Pi and relays. It is not so cheap for just a few rigs as you need to buy a Pi 3 board, but once the number of rig rises the cost per system lowers. You can always start with a few and then add extra systems if needed, again you should have no problems driving up to 25 systems through the GPIO pins of the RPi 3. There are of course other commercial solutions also available for you to purchase that have been developer by miners for miners such as the SimpleMining SimpleRigResetter that we have talked about last year and now there is apparently a new version of the device already available, though it seems to be out of stock at the moment.
If you have been following us for a while already you have probably noticed that we are not big fans of ICOs and we aren’t covering much of these, even though lately there is a boom of Initial Coin Offerings and it seems that pretty much everyone is releasing tokens for something. There are however some that we do mention and take part into, mostly in serious ICOs that are being pushed by entities that already have some good product or service available and have some background and not just promises that might as well turn out to be empty. Once in a while there are some that are really worth talking about and that goes not because they have generated a lot of noise or have managed to secure insane amount of funding, but because they are really something worthwhile, different, disruptive and so on. A recent such example is Brave’s Basic Attention Token (BAT) that we have covered as we’ve been following the development of the Brave browser for a while already.
According to a welche Aktien kaufen 2020 report, another interesting ICO that we think is worth talking about and taking a part in is the Giga Watt (WTT) Token that is currently ongoing and will continue until July 31st or until all of the 30 Million tokens are sold. The Giga Watt WTT token are being issued on the Ethereum blockchain like many others that we have seen recently, but what is different here than most other ICOs is the fact that the launch of the ICO is together with a whole platform to support the token (as well as other future tokens). One of the issues with Ethereum ERC20 tokens we are seeing is that normally they are not very easy for people that are not more into Ethereum to take part into… the process is just really not that easy for not so technical or “into crypto” type of people.
The WTT tokens are being distributed via the new Cryptonomos platform for token sales as well as management. The Giga Watt (WTT) Token is essentially the first token launched together with the platform for easy purchase and management of the available tokens by the user. This eliminates the need for the user to look for compatible Ethereum wallets and to do complex things in order to take part into an ICO based in a crowdsale essentially significantly lowering the requirements and removing many of the obstacles. Thanks to the Cryptonomos platform you can easily transfer Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) or cash via a wire transfer and use them to purchase WTT tokens, and probably other tokens in the future as well. You should be also able to transfer tokens in and out of the platform when they are abvailable just like you would do if using a compatible Ethereum wallet for interacting with smart contracts. Of course there is the other point of view regarding the use of a dedicated platform – you are not in full control of your tokens like you can with an Ethereum wallet for example where you hold the private keys for the wallet.
Let us get back to Giga Watt (the former MegaBigPower), a USA-based company offering crypto mining hardware as well as hosting for it and of course enough electricity to power it and keep it cool. The company offers also users to host their own existing miners and even an add-on paid option of emergency equipment repairs in case of an issue in order to minimize downtime. The release of the WTT token allows the token holders to gain access to Giga Watt’s facility at a lower hosting rate, which in turn significantly increases the mining rewards. Each Giga Watt Project Token (WTT) represents the right to use the Giga Watt processing center’s capacity, rent-free for 50 years, to accommodate 1 Watt’s worth of mining equipment power consumption. Token owners can use the capacity they purchase to accommodate their own miners or if they don’t own or plan to purchase any miners to take advantage of the hosting offer to just rent it out to other users. The idea that Giga Watt has is to use the token sale to be able to expand their capacity and to reward token holders that help them achieve that, so a win-win for both sides. For all the details about the Giga Watt (WTT) token and the plans of the company issuing it you should take a look at the detailed WTT token whitepaper (PDF) where everything is explained in much more details and all your questions should be answered.
– For more details about the Cryptonomos platform and the Giga Watt (WTT) Token sale…
With the switch from the RX 400 to the new RX 500 series (even if there is not much difference in hardware), AMD started having issues with availability. Older GPUs have been pretty much sold out where there were some left and the newer 570/580 models are pretty much out of stock everywhere. If there are some units left they are with an inflated price tag, because the people selling them want to make some extra bucks from the lack of availability and high demand. It is not known how long this lack of video cards will continue, but things were slowly progressing towards this negative outcome the whole month.
We are pretty sure that one of the reasons is mining and the recent peak of the price and profitability of Ethereum that inevitably leads to more and more new miners and mining rigs getting built. It seems however that AMD was really not ready for an increased demand after the release of the RX 500 series, even though RX 400 GPUs were already selling a lot. It may take a couple of weeks for things to get back to normal, unless the craze continues and unless AMD is actually having trouble making enough GPUs at the moment to cover the demand. Maybe the fact that the company is preparing for the release of their newer higher-end Vega solutions has something to do with the problem as well.
Miners are already looking at the alternatives of using Nvidia GPUs that are available plenty on the market, because they are not as good deal for Ethereum mining like the AMD cards in terms of price/performance. If you however take out the Ethash algorithm (Dagger-Hashimoto) out of the equation Nvidia’s Pascal GPUs are actually pretty good in terms of performance/power usage ratio… just not as good in memory intensive algorithms where GPU power is not required as much. Mining aside, gamers already have no other choice but to go for Nvidia if they are currently in the market for a new video card with AMD GPUs being out of stock.
The people that were mining a couple of years back during the Litecoin craze will most likely remember a similar situation where things got out of control for a while with the exchange rate of LTC exploding. This was only temporary as everyone was rushing to get into mining the top altcoin back then and then the price went down and things started to get back to normal. There are no guarantees that the same situation will happen again though, but don’t forget that we may be heading for a POW to POS switch for Ethereum by the end of the year…