Search Results

BitCash (BITC) is a new crypto project being described as a solution that combines the power of blockchain with the features of banking to create the world’s most usable cryptocurrency and one that is easy to be used by regular people. It combines the advantages of cryptocurrency (speed, privacy, decentralization, low fees) with traditional fiat banking systems (transaction records, account names, electronic statements, accounting software integration), making BitCash an interesting project to keep an eye on. Since you can also mine BITC, if you are looking for new interesting coins to mine that are new and still under the radar. then BitCash is once more interesting find. BitCash (BITC) uses the same proof of work mining algorithm as Merit (MRT) that we have recently talked about, however the Cuckoo cycle algorithm in BitCash is using an Edgebit value of 27 and not 26 like for Merit. As a result you need a specific miner for BitCash (BITC) and get lower hashrate due to the difference in parameters and the official Merit miner will not work, though there is a third-parity miner already available that supports both coins, but more for that in a minute. Some good places to trade the coin include Citex, Stex, TOKOK, Crex and Graviex.

Although BitCash (BITC) uses the same mining algorithm as Merit (MRT), the general idea and the implementation of the project is quite different, so it is not just a simple fork. BitCash has a maximum coin supply of 100,000,000 BITC, the block time is 1 minute and block reward is 21.5 BITC in total, however there is a 9.7% premine and an ongoing 10% from the block reward going to the developers, so the actual block reward that goes to miners is 19.35 BITC per block. There is no proof of stake or growth score, so the coin can be pretty much only mined and traded, though there is no official or third-parity exchange supporting it for the moment (the project is still just a couple of days old and ecosystem development is still going on). If you are interested in buying or selling some BITC coins you can currently do so on the official Discord channel of the project.

If you have already mined Merit (MRT), then you will be familiar with the official miner for BitCash (BITC). It is essentially the same software with a slight modifications and it works only on Nvidia GPUs as there is currently no Cuckoo cycle miner for AMD GPUs available, you need to use this miner (or another compatible one) in order to mine BitCash. The bitcash-minerd will produce a bout half the hashrate that the merit-minerd manages to get you due to the different Edgebit parameter, so do not be alarmed when you see lower hashrate, it is normal. The miner is CPU dependent, so on mining rigs with slower processors the hashrate will be lower than on rigs with faster processors and there could be some stability issues as well, so you might want to stick to the example batch (BAT) file to run the miner just like you would with the official Merit miner (for 6 GPU mining rigs):

:loop
start bitcash-minerd.exe --url stratum+tcp://bitcash.luckypool.io:5777 --address 15v53ZR4YbU86n6oQV2JgMfrBaRMNQ6oQZyQwsuNNgBLCqSJWAc --gpu 0 1 2 3 4 5 --cores 0
wmic process where name="bitcash-minerd.exe" CALL setpriority 16384
timeout /t 1800
taskkill /f /im bitcash-minerd.exe
goto loop

You can download the official bitcash-minerd.exe miner for Windows here, there is a version available for Linux in the form of Ubuntu 18.04 and Ubuntu 16.04. Do note that the miner requires an Nvidia GPU with at least 4GB of video memory and you need up to date video drivers installed with support for the latest CUDA versions.

Here is a list of the currently available mining pools for BitCash and it is best if you mine on one of them, as solo mining even with GPU may soon be pointless, like CPU mining already is:

https://bitcash.luckypool.io/pool/BITC/
http://bitc.ginasismining.com/pool/BITC/
http://bitc.youpool.io:3001/pool/BITC/
http://premierpool.club:3456/pool/BITC/

Today zjazz has released an update to his zjazz cuda miner for the Cuckoo cycle algorithm adding support for BitCash (BITC) along the already available Merit (MRT) support in the software. It is a closed source miner available with binaries for both Windows and Linux that offers more options to try and tweak performance on mining rigs with both slower or faster CPUs, though this comes at a cost of 2% developer fee. Do note that the miner is still an early version and work in progress and may have some issues, though it does seem to handle better than the official miner on systems with slower processors stability wise.

If you are interested in the BitCash (BITC) project already and want to get into it…

Yesterday we have shared our First Impressions from the Gigabyte NP106D5-6G GPU Built for Crypto Mining and today we are going to talk a bit more about actually mining with the GPU and what to expect from it in terms of hashrate. You probably are already read that we were not that happy with the hardware implementation around the Nvidia GP106-100 GPU that Gigabyte did with this particular model. There are however a few more things that need to be noted before we move to the performance numbers…

Since the GP106-100 GPU is intended only for mining and although based on the consumer GTX 1060 it is a different product the latest official Nvidia Graphics Driver 384.76 for GeForce GPUs does not have support for the Gigabyte NP106D5-6G. Things get even weirder when you go to Gigabyte’s website and you do not find a product page for that particular model, nor a support page with the drivers you need to install. There is no driver CD included in the package either, so you just go to Asus’ website and download the driver for their GP106-100 implementation and it works just fine.

Since the Gigabyte NP106D5-6G GPU does not have any external video outputs you will need to use it along with motherboard that has a built-in Intel GPU support (or maybe even AMD APU). You still need to be able to install the OS and configure things some way, after that you can use remote administration of some kind to control and monitor things, so not that big of an issue. There are however some motherboards that can be used for mining with 6 GPUs, however you cannot get 6x GP106-100 GPUs on them along with the built-in graphics working, so you need to be careful about that as well.

Here are the specifications for the Gigabyte NP106D5-6G GPU according to GPU-Z. The stock settings do not seem much different than the ones of a regular GeForce GTX 1060 6GB model and performance wise there should be not that much of a difference either. That is as far as the stock settings go, but one would still hope that labeling this a mining GPU would still bring some extra benefits not only in terms of properly designed hardware for the miner’s needs, but also improvements such as better memory timings for mining for example. Unfortunately that was not the case for Gigabyte’s product in either of the two – the hardware design and the memory optimizations…

The mining performance for ZCash (ZEC) and other Equihash-based mining algorithms is pretty much the same as on a regular GeForce GTX 1060 6GB GPUs. You can expect to get around 300 Sol/s using the popular EWBF ZEC CUDA miner and overclocking the video memory does not help much in improving the hashrate, though playing with the frequencies can squeeze a bit more extra performance. Clearly while not bad in terms of performance these Nvidia mining GPUs are not intended to be sued for ZEC mining as much as for other crypto currencies.

When talking about other crypto currencies we actually mean that the Gigabyte NP106D5-6G GPU and more specifically the whole Nvidia GP106-100 product is targeted at Ethereum (ETH) miners. Using the latest Claymore ETH dual miner we managed to squeeze just about 20.9 MHS mining Ethereum with the card and unfortunately that is not very satisfying result. Still this is just the default result at stock settings, things get more interesting when you start tweaking things a bit.

Overclocking the Samsung GDDR5 video memory has produced some surprisingly good results. We have managed to squeeze +900 MHz extra form the video memory using Afterburner and the card remained stable for mining. The result was a performance of about 26 MHS at stock TDP of 120W. Lowering down the TDP to 65% or with just about 80W per GPU the result was still about 25.9 MHS, so things started looking pretty good. So clearly Nvidia is targeting the product at Ethereum miners where with some overclocking it can provide really good performance results in terms of hashrate and power consumption.

The big question here is if the slightly lower price of the Nvidia GP106-100 GPUs like this one on the retail market is worth for small home miners. Originally these were intended for large scale mining operations where the prices are probably more attractive when you are talking about hundreds and thousands units. If you are able to get similar results in terms of performance from a regular GTX 1060 GPU with full warranty, video output connectors and no other cost cutting at a slightly higher price then things are may not be looking that good for Nvidia GP106-100. Though in our experience most GTX 1060 6GB models with 8 GHz video memory max out at about 24 MHS with overclocking on Ethereum. So it is up to you to decide if it is worth it, but again we are not too happy with Gigabyte’s solution to the mining problem. Their NP106D5-6G GPU is essentially a stripped down model of a consumer product to make it cheaper, not to make it better or more useful for crypto miners.

While AsRock has not yet released for sale their new motherboard AsRock H110 Pro BTC+ With 13 GPU support we already got confirmation that it is working with 13 video cards for mining under Linux and Windows. The sale of the new Pro BTC+ mining motherboard will probably not start before next month, but we already hope to be able to get an in-depth review hopefully by the end of this month or early next month.

Running 13 GPUs on a single mining rig might be a bit of a challenge as it is not only the motherboard that needs to provide you with the base, but you also need to take care of other hardware as well. Hardware such as power supplies that will handle 13 GPUs, we are talking about multiple PSUs for sure. There are also other possible challenges associated with more GPUs such as higher requirement towards the memory/swap as well as maybe even faster CPU to handle additional load coming from the mining software.

We have seen proof of 13 AMD GPUs running on the AsRock H110 Pro BTC+ motherboard under Linux using the ethOS distribution for mining as well as 13 Nvidia GPUs recognized and working under Windows 10. We are yet to confirm this ourselves by testing the motherboard, but what we are seeing as results already is reassuring that we are going to get a real and working solution for more GPUs per mining rig than what is currently available in terms of 6, 7 and even 8 GPU mining motherboards. Since the AsRock H110 Pro BTC+ motherboard is designed with crypto mining in mind it should be easy and problem free to setup, unlike some other motherboards that people are using at the moment that need some special settings or tweaks in order to make them work with more video cards than they are originally designed for.


top