CPU Mining MicroBitcoin (MBC) Using the Power2b Algorithm

7 May
2020

MicroBitcoin (MBC) has started as a hard fork from Bitcoin at block 525000 some time ago, but since its inception it has moved through some changes and it its current form it is interesting for everyone that has spare CPU resources for mining. MBC currently employs a CPU-only mining algorithm called power2b which is essentially a yespower modification which is replaces sha256 with blake2b. Power2b or yespower2b is a CPU friendly algorithm with no GPU miners available and no apparent FPGA or ASICs miners available. So while a single CPU might not earn a lot of MicroBitcoin per day it is still something useful to do instead of having your CPUs sitting idle, and if you want to exchange the bitcoin into dollars there are tools as the Bitcoin to paypal services which help a lot of this.

There are a number of miners available with support for the power2b (yespower2b) algorithm with two of them that seem the most reasonable to be used. The fastest one at the moment of all variants that we have tried is the latest SRBMiner-MULTI miner closed source miner that has a 0.85% development fee and the bit slower cpuminer-opt that is open source and has no development fee (supported by user donations). Feel free to try them both on your hardware and see what works better, though in all our tests SRBMiner-MULTI has proved to be faster even with the extra dev fee. It is worth noting that Intel CPUs do manage to perform significantly better compared to their AMD counterparts, in fact an Intel Core i7-6850K (6C-12T) processor manages to get about 1550 H/s while an AMD Ryzen 9 3900X (12C-24T) surprisingly manages to get us just about 1000 H/s. So AMD Ryzen CPU users might be willing to stay away from this algorithm and use their CPU mining resource for RandomX and RandomX variations where the Ryzen CPUs do manage to get significantly better results compared to most Intel processors.

There are a number of mining pools available with support for MicroBitcoin (MBC) mining, but the top ones you might give a try are HashPool, Rplant, Zergpool, Zpool and SkyPool. Zergpool and Zpool support the option to mine MBC and get paid in MBCg or to mine MBC and have the coins autoconverted and sent as their BTC value, the other pools are just for mining MBC coins. The preferred crypto exchange with support for MBC to trade coins is Stex that has two trading pairs – MBC/ETH and MBC/USDT.

– For more details about the MicroBitcoin (MBC) crypto project on the official website…

Nanominer 1.9.1 With AMD Support for the KAWPOW Algorithm

6 May
2020

The latest Nanominer 1.9.1 mining software has added support for the new KAWPOW algorithm used by Ravencoin (RVN) for AMD GPUs with Nvidia GPU support expected soon to be available as well. This is essentially the second GPU miner to support KAWPOW on AMD with the other one being NBMiner with both miners being closed source and with 2% development fee for the KAWPOW algorithm. Nanominer claims they use their own custom implementation for KAWPOW and we see slightly higher hashrate compared to what we get with NBMiner on the same AMD Radeon RX 580 GPUs, though both miners do manage to produce slightly above 10 MH/s on our test setup. We remind you that since KAWPOW is based on ProgPoW it is also GPU intensive and not so much memory dependent, so overclocking the graphic processor can help increasing hashrate.

Nanominer is a closed source miner developed by Nanopool available for Linux and Windows and supporting AMD and Nvidia GPUs as well as CPUs for mining. The supported algorithms for GPUs include: Ethash and Ubqhash with 1% dev fee, KawPow with 2% dev fee, Cuckaroo30 at 5% dev fee. The supported CPU algorithms are RandomX with 2% dev fee and RandomHash2 at 5% with support for mining CPU and GPU algorithms at the same time.

– For more information and to download and try Nanominer 1.9.1 by Nanopool…

Ravencoin (RVN) Has Successfully Hardforked and Switched to KAWPOW

6 May
2020

Ravencoin (RVN) has officially hardforked and has switched the PoW mining algorithm from X16Rv2 to KAWPOW. If you are running a local Ravencoin wallet you need to make sure that you have the latest Ravencoin v4.1.0 release installed. Most mining pools and services supporting RVN have already updated and support the fork, though as usual you should be careful moving coins for a while after the fork just to be on the safe side.

The Mining Rig Rentals service for leasing and renting mining rigs has recently added support for KAWPOW rigs, and so just did the NiceHash hashrate selling/buying service right in time for the fork. It will be interesting to see what will happen and if NiceHash could end up being more profitable than directly mining for Ravencoin with the user attention that the fork is generating already. And although the fork should drive away ASIC miners from the Ravencoin network the NiceHaash support could bring a lot of mining hashrate from GPU users that are not interested in RVN itself, but are in it just for the sake of better profit. AMD GPU miners can mine RVN with the new KAWPOW algorithm only using NBMiner for now at least. Nvidia GPU miners have much more choice for mining software such as kawpowminer, TT-Miner, GMiner, T-Rex, Z-enemy and Bminer. The latest kawpowminer and TT-Miner do not have dev fees, others do have 1% or 2% fee, so while performance is very similar with all of them the difference in terms of development fee can influence the decision you make.

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