Are You Ready for the Ravencoin (RVN) Fork to KAWPOW Algo

5 May
2020

With just 1 day left until the hard fork of Ravencoin (RVN) to the new KAWPOW algorithm everyone that is planning to mine the cryptocurrency once more should be well prepared. There are already a number of miners supporting the new algorithm available, as well as some test pools where you can test and setup your GPU mining rigs for optimal performance. The Mining Rig Rentals service for leasing and renting mining rigs has just added support for KAWPOW rigs, but NiceHash has not yet added support for the new algorithm, so no massive hash going on and off on the RVN network after the fork. The KAWPOW algorithm is a variation of ProgPow and the available miners are offering very close performance, so the deciding factor in choosing should be what you are more familiar with and what works better for you (has less fee, or no dev fee at all, is open source or not etc.). Users with Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti might benefit the most from the new algorithm to be used by RVN, AMD owners with one of the most popular Radeon RX 480/580 GPUs might not be too happy whit the hashrate they will be getting (about half of the GTX 1080 Ti). KAWPOW is more GPU intensive and not affected by the video memory that much, so the more powerful the GPU, the higher the hashrate.

AMD Radeon users are significantly limited in their choice of mining software for the KAWPOW algorithm at the moment as there is essentially just one option available – the closed source NBMiner with 2% dev fee for KAWPOW that also supports Nvidia GPUs. The only opensource miner with no dev fee is the official kawpowminer that only works with Nvidia GPUs for the moment, though AMD support will hopefully be also added. The other KAWPOW miners are all closed source and work only on Nvidia GPUs for the moment, these are GMiner with 2% dev fee, T-Rex with 1% dev fee and TT-Miner with 1% dev fee. Our preferred choice out of these miners at the moment is T-Rex for Nvidia GPUs, though we are still waiting to also see an updated release of the z-enemy miner, so our preference may change in the future. We are also hopefully soon going to start seeing some additional optimizations to help differentiate performance from different miners at least a bit more…

T-Rex 0.15.3 Nvidia Miner With KAWPOW Support for RavenCoin (RVN)

3 May
2020

The latest T-Rex Nvidia GPU miner version 0.15.3 has introduced support for the new KAWPOW algorithm just as expect in time for the fork of RavenCoin (RVN) that is coming in just a few days – May 6th 2020 at 18:00:00 UTC. Aside from the new Kawpow support for the upcoming RVN fork, the latest T-Rex miner also adds supports for ProgPow and MTP-tcr algorithms.

Aside from T-Rex adding support for KAWPOW in the latest version, there are a few other alternatives available already – the official open-source kawpowminer, the latest TT-Miner, the latest NBMiner and the latest GMiner. The only one that is still missing support for KAWPOW is Z-Enemy, however enemy has already announced that there should be an update before the RVN fork and it will also support the new Ravencoin algorithm.

T-Rex is closed source Nvidia GPU miner available for both Linux and Windows operating systems. The miner comes in multiple versions supporting CUDA 9.1, CUDA 9.2 and CUDA 10.0. The miner has developer fee of 1% for all of the supported algorithms, only tensority has a higher dev fee of 3%.

– For more information and to download and try the latest version of the T-Rex miner…

Verus Coin (VRSC) VerusHash 2.1 Algorithm Mining With CPU

3 May
2020

Verus Coin (VRSC) is an interesting crypto project available for a while already that offers a hybrid PoW/PoS mode of operation, so you can mine and stake VRSC coins. The idea of the project and its custom VerusHash algorithm is to be mined with CPU and even though GPU miners do exist for the algo, they do not offer a performance advantage over a powerful processor. Near the end of last year Hashaltcoin FPGA mining support was made available publicly for the VerusHash algorithm with much better efficiency compared to existing CPU/GPU miners and that quickly drove away regular miners. This required a revision of the mining algorithm and the latest VerusHash 2.1 made FPGA miners unable to be used and brought back CPUs as the main choice for mining.

The preferred choice for mining Verus Coin (VRSC) is with CPU and the miner you need is called hellminer, or alternatively you can try with nheqminer. Hellminer is the faster, but closed source even though there is no developer fee it is limited to a single pool only – LuckPool, available for Linux and Windows, so you might want to go for it first. The Nheqminer miner fork (about 10-20% slower compared to hellminer) for VRSC is a bit slower in terms of performance, but is open source and available for Linux, Windows and MacOS and can work with all of the available mining pools.

As already mentioned there are miners for GPUs as well, but they do not offer performance advantage over CPU mining, in fact a multi-GPU mining rig might offer similar or slower performance to a higher-end processor, but with a much higher power usage. So while it is not very reasonable to mine VRSC with GPUs, you can at least try to see what your hardware is capable of and how it relates to CPU performance. There is a ccminer Verushash fork available for Nvidia GPUs as well as AMD Verushash miner available for AMD GPUs.

As far as performance is concerned, AMD’s latest generation Ryzen CPUs do seem to have some advantage over Intel processors, but in general the more cores you have, the better hashrate you can expect to get. Ryzen 3900X (12C-24T) does about 30 MH/s, while an Intel 6850K (6C-12T) does manage to get you just about 11 MH/s hashrate. As a comparison a GPU mining a GTX 1080 Ti does manage to get you just about 6 MH/s per GPU, so as we’ve explained it might not be very wise to mine VRSC with anything other than a higher-end processor, although it is possible to also use GPUs from AMD and Nvidia.

If you need a mining pool where you can try mining Verus Coin (VRSC), then you probably want to head on to Luckpool where most of the hashrate is currently located, alternatively you can try Lepool or Zergpool. The largest pool LuckPool has some nice features to miners such as awarding the block finder with a fixed reward as well as a hybrid solo mining mode where you still get rewarded even when not finding a block yourself. VRSC is currently traded on multiple smaller crypto exchanges such as SafeTrade, STEX, Graviex, AAcoin, Kuang Exchange.

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