Ethereum’s Istanbul Hard Fork to Start on December 4th

8 Nov
2019

The first phase of Ethereum’s next major hard fork is planned to happen on less than a month around December 4th at block number 9056000. The hard fork called Istanbul is divided in two parts with the first one to be executed on December 4th and the second one planned for early 2020. The next hard fork called Serenity that will bring Ethereum 2.0 and switch the project from PoW to PoS may or may not happen before the end of 2020, so there is still time for that. Is is worth mentioning that on December 4th Ethereum (ETH) will not be switching its mining algorithm from Ethash to the much anticipated and still somewhat controversial ProgPoW as this is still planned to happen in the second Istanbul phase with the EIP-1057 scheduled for the first quarter of 2020.

If you are still mining Ethereum with ASIC miners or GPUs and the Ethash algorithm you will have more than just a month left, it could easily take up to another 6 months for ProgPoW to replace Ethash as the PoW algorithm, though it can also happen faster than that. Nevertheless this can signal the upcoming death of ETH ASIC miners as although there are a number of other projects using the Ethash algorithm, they will most likely not be able to handle the massive hashrate outflow from Ethereum if/when it forks to ProgPoW. On the other hand ProgPoW can also bring a change in the way GPUs are being used for mining as it is supposed to provide a more level playing field for the different GPUs in terms of mining performance. So definitely Ethereum’s upcoming hard forks will have a serious impact on the crypto mining sector.

Veil to Fork and Change Their Mining Reward Distribution

8 Nov
2019

The VEIL project, a privacy-oriented cryptocurrency, has announced their plans for an upcoming fork to change the way PoW mining works in an upcoming fork. The project launched earlier this year has started with X16RT as a PoW algorithm for mining making 50% of the total block reward and the other 50% is for users staking coins in their wallet. The 50% reward for miners will continue, however it will be split in three different parts in the future with 3 different algorithms in play. Veil miners will have the option to chose to mine using ProgPoW (Programmatic Proof-of-Work) for GPUs that will account for 35% of those 50%, RandomX for CPU mining will represent 10% and the remaining 5% for miners will go to SHA-256D ASIC miners. It is interesting change as prior to announcing these plans the project was anti-ASIC, but now it seems that it is planning to attract all kinds of miners – GPU, CPU and ASICs. Also an interesting fact is that they have chosen to go for multiple algorithms including the much talked about ProgPow to be soon used by Ethereum and RandomX to be soon used by Monero. The fork date is not yet announced and it may take a while before these plans get applied to the mainnet of Veil, so for now the project remains on X16RT as far as mining is concerned.

– For more details about the future plans of the VEIL project regarding PoW changes…

New SRBMiner-MULTI CPU and AMD GPU Miner 0.1.5 Beta With RandomX Support

7 Nov
2019

The latest SRBMiner-MULTI 0.1.5 miner has introduced support for the RandomX and its few variants for CPU mining, something that we were eagerly anticipating to see and to compare the performance to the already available XMRig RandomX CPU miner. SRBMiner-MULTI 0.1.5 supports CPU mining of RandomX for the upcoming Monero (XMR) fork, the variants RandomXL for LOKI and RandomWow or Wownero that are already using their new algorithms for mining as well as the RandomArq for the upcoming ArQmA (ARQ) fork. There are some new features, improvements and fixes as well that might be helpful and useful with the new release, so you might want to check out the full changelog.

The most important question is what performance to expect from the atest SRBMiner-MULTI and the RandomX algorithm compared to what XMRig is already delivering to CPU miners? Well, unfortunately it seems that so far SRBMiner-MULTI will need to do better in order to catch up to the performance level tat latest XMRig is delivering, at least on AMD’s Ryzen 3xxx series of CPUs that do seem to be delivering one of the best RandomX hashrates out there for the moment. We have tested and compared both miners on an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 CPU (6 cores, 12 threads) and the results are significantly in favor of XMRig. While SRBMiner-MULTI CPU manages to deliver around 3000 H/s in our tests, the same system manages 5500+ H/s, so you might want to stick to XMRig for now until SRBMiner-MULTI gets further improved performance. With an Intel Core i7 6850K processor (6 cores, 12 threads) the XMRig does 2500 H/s while SRBMiner-MULTI CPU manages to deliver just around 1500 H/s and it seems that the slower hashrate is a direct result of the miner not being able to fully utilize 100% of the available processor resources. The overall CPU load for SRBMiner-MULTI mining RandomX is just around 50% and not full 100% percent that it should be with the miner fully using all 12 threads of the processor.

– To download and try the new SRBMiner-MULTI CPU and AMD GPU Miner 0.1.5 Beta…

top