Litecoin Difficulty Up Again, DOGE Profitability Getting Better Again

17 Feb
2014

litecoin-hashrate-new-difficulty-change

Litecoin (LTC) difficulty has gone up again for the next 3 days. After DOGE coin moved past block 100000 and the reward per block was halved and the recent fork on the DOGE network accompanied by panic sell from some users things are finally getting back to normal. What also helped for that was the adjustment of difficulty for the LTC, going up by a bit more than 19% to 3207 has made DOGE much more profitable to mine at the moment. The DOGE difficulty has also decreased a bit, so as soon as the pool you are were mining DOGE has updated their DOGE software you can move back to mining DOGE again. Another good thing with the increase of the DOGE profitability, our new favorite backup pool LTC Rabbit has again started mining alternative cryptos such as DOGE and pays alt coin bonus after a few slow days with only LTC being mined. For the moment the alt coin bonus payed in LTC is small, but it should increase more after the next 4 hour shift is over due to the increase of DOGE profitability. Hopefully things with the recent BTC exchange issues will continue moving in the right direction and we should see the exchange rates for bot LTC and BTC starting to get back to their normal levels.

Blakecoin (BLC) Blake-256 alternative cryptocoin

17 Feb
2014

blakecoin-alternative-crypto

Blakecoin is a experimental cryptographic digital currency that enables payments to anyone, anywhere in the world. Blakecoin uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority: managing transactions and issuing coins are carried out collectively by the network.

Blakecoin (BLC) uses Blake-256 (optimized) faster than Scrypt, SHA-256D and Keccak algorithm and thus provides much faster hashrate from the same hardware as compared to the other alternatives. The algorithm was written as a candidate for SHA-3, based on round one candidate code from the Sphlib 2.1 library and reduced the round function to 8 rounds. BLC can currently be mined with both CPU, GPU and FPGA, though GPU mining is the best option at the moment for AMD graphics card owners. Blakecoin (BLC) requires a special miner software!

The Blake-256 algorithm hash rate is just under 3x faster on the GPU and just over 2x on the FPGA compared with Bitcoin. So for example with a Radeon R9 280X you can expect to get a hashrate of about 2-2.5 GH/s or more when mining Blackecoin. The reward for mining Blakecoin does Not decrease over time it only increases with block height and difficulty. Block reward is 25 coin + inflation (square root of (difficulty * block height)) and the total of 7 Billion coins will be mined.

Website
– http://www.blakecoin.org/

Block Explorer / Crawler
– http://blc.cryptocoinexplorer.com/

SPECIFICATIONS

  • Blake-256 (optimized) Algo, faster than Scrypt and SHA-256D
  • Block reward is 25 coin + inflation (square root of (difficulty * block height))
  • No reduction of block reward
  • Cap in place to reduce the difficulty jumps upwards
  • Block target time is 3 minutes and retargets every 20 blocks
  • Total of 7 Billion coins
  • Block maturity 120 (+20 buffer 140 Total)

DOWNLOADS
– Windows
– Linux
– Mac

Blake-256 Algorithm GPU miners:
– Cgminer 3.7.2 with Blake-256 support for AMD
– Cgminer 3.1.1 with Blake-256 support for AMD
– CudaMiner with Blake-256 support for Nvidia
– ccMiner with Blake-256 support for Nvidia

Source Code
– at GitHub

PORTS

  • RPC Port: 8772

POOLS
– http://cg1.blakecoin.com/
– http://eu3.blakecoin.com/
– http://ny2.blakecoin.com/
– http://la1.blakecoin.com/

EXCHANGES
– Atomic Trade

DOGEcoin Network Fork Causing Momentary Panic Sale

17 Feb
2014

dogecoin-fork-panic-sale

There was a momentary panic sale apparently caused by a network fork for DOGEcoin, but it seems things are getting back to normal now. There could be some delays processing transactions though due to some pools and exchanges not running the latest version of the doge client software, and some pools such as Multipool have temporary disabled DOGE withdraws until they fix the problem. Just don’t get the panic get a hold of you, things are already getting back to normal. Below is some info from the developers:

The network has forked around block 104678. From my first investigation, it looks like the version below and above 1.5 disagree on the correct blockchain. Currently, the clients below 1.5 stopped accepting new blocks. Solely the 1.5+ clients are now generating and accepting new blocks. Older nodes will generate blocks too, but those will be rejected by the network as 1.5+ nodes are used by more than 51% of users.

THIS IS NOT A 51% ATTACK!

We are actively looking into why this happened. I can’t say much yet (I’m at work), but the safest currently is updating your client to 1.5.1.

Pool owners: I know about that issue with 1.5+, but there is currently no other way, as we can’t patch 1.4 so fast. We have to investigate why that fork happened. A debug.log of a 1.4 node could help.

Try to reduce your transactions to a minimum while this is being worked on. Check your block count in the bottom right corner of your wallet to see on which side of the chain you are. As of writing this, my client shows ~104773 blocks. This seems to be the currently longest, therefore “correct” chain.

– You can find more information about the DOGEcoin network fork here…

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