Zcash (ZEC) Blossom Upgrade To Improve Speed, Scalability and Capacity

11 Dec
2019

Zcash Blossom is the next major network upgrade of Zcash (ZEC) scheduled to activate today at block height 653600 in a couple of hours. This mandatory network upgrade is designed to improve the network scalability and user experience by cutting block times in half (to about 75 seconds), making transaction confirmations faster, doubling network throughput and keeping transaction fees low. To keep the ZEC coin emission rate and halvening schedule of Zcash unchanged, the halved block times also require that the per-block reward be halved as well. The emission rate per time, however, remains unchanged. Other values based on block intervals will also be updated accordingly, such as end-of-service halt, default transaction expiry, and the number of confirmations required to consider a transaction final.

– For a Zcash Blossom countdown and additional information about the upgrade…

RagerX, a New Faster Mining Software for RandomX With Own Dedicated Pool

9 Dec
2019

RagerX is a new RandomX miner for Monero (XMR), built for speed and ease of use, featuring an integrated PPLNS pool and its own dedicated operating system for the mining software. According to the developers RagerX is the fastest and easiest RandomX miner on the market, offering up to 10% faster performance compared to other RandomX CPU miners available such as XMR-Stak-RX or XMRig. There is a catch however, you need to flash a dedicated operating system that the RagerX miner uses on a USB flash and boot from it on your mining rig and use the dedicated mining pool that only supports Monero (XMR) mining for the moment, though support for other RandomX coins is apparently coming soon.

With the RagerX miner you get up to 10% faster performance with zero development fee for the miner, but since you have to use the dedicated pool you are going to get a 3.5% pool fee, but even like that you should still get better hashrate compared to other alternatives that are supposedly slower. The only drawback for the moment is the fact that the RagerX Monero mining pool was just opened for the public and the hashrate it currently has is pretty low, so it will take a bit of time for users to come and bump it up so there is a faster block time. What we liked especially is the fact that email address is not required for a registration to the pool, only username and password along with an XMR payment address… an email address can be added later on if you wish to use notifications for example. The pool uses the PPLNS payout system which is short for Pay-Per-Last-N-Shares and the minimum payout is 0.1 XMR which can take a while to be reached with just a single CPU mining RandomX.

– To check out the RagerX faster dedicated mining software and pool solution for RandomX…

Mining Equilibria (XEQ) Using the Cryptonight-GPU Algorithm

9 Dec
2019

Equilibria (XEQ) is an interesting mineable crypto project, a relatively new one, that gives the ability to the owners of XEQ to issue $USDE – a stablecoin redeemable for $1 equivalent of Equilibria… the so called private and decentralized dollar. It is an interesting alternative to the traditional stablecoins we know and use in the world of crypto, so worth checking out. Another interesting thing is that the Equilibria (XEQ) project has forked and is currently using the Cryptonight-GPU algorithm that we know from RYO and we like thanks to the fair GPU mining to all participants in the mining process it offers regardless if they use AMD or Nvidia GPUs, unlike what most other CryptoNight variants.

The difficulty and hasrate for the Equilibria is not that big at the moment, so it might be a good oppotrtunity to jump in and mine some XEQ coins. As already mentioned the project uses Cryptonight-GPU can be mined with XMR-Stak, XMRig and SRBMiner – the most popular AMD CryptoNight miners as well as with CryptoDredge for Nvidia GPUs for best performance. There are a few mining pools available with HeroMiners being the largest in terms of hashrate at the moment. XEQ is also traded on a couple of exchanges already such as TradeOgre, Qtrade and Citex.

– For additional information about the Equilibria (XEQ) crypto project…

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