Posts Tagged ‘BEAM Hard Fork’

Next BEAM Hard Fork is Planned for June 28th (Block #777777)

22, Apr 2020

The Beam project has announced their plans for an upcoming hard fork that will occur at Block Height 777777, expected to be reached on June 28th this year. The most notable change in this hard fork is the switch from BeamHash II to the new BeamHash III algorithm for mining. Do note that since this is a hard fork after the Block Height 777777 is reached, wallets earlier than 5.0 will stop working, so the users will need to upgrade the wallets to version 5.0 or later to access their funds. The Node and the Desktop Wallet binaries should be released around the end of May, so about month before the hard fork.

The wider memory operations in the design of BeamHash III apparently allow better use of the fuller capabilities of a GPU card. Making it easier to saturate the given bandwidth of the GPU card, reducing the potential advantage of other devices, especially FPGAs. The stronger algorithm binding of the new scheme utilized in BeamHash III will make “unknown optimizations” potentially used for secret mining, more unlikely. The lesser compute dependency of BeamHash III reduces the potential advantage of multi-chip ASICs over GPUs whilst also allowing GPUs to run lesser clock rates, for more improved hashrate. And a single chip ASIC would likely not be economically feasible.

– To read the full details of the official announcement of the next BEAM Hard Fork…

Get Ready for the BEAM Hard Fork Scheduled for August 15th (Block #321321)

13, Aug 2019

The BEAM Project is having a hard fork in about two days and you need to make sure that you are ready for it if you are mining it or are using a local wallet for BEAM. The BEAM Hard Fork is scheduled for block #321321 which should be reached sometime in August 15th and you need to mak sure your wallet is up to date as well as your miner. Make sure you get the latest BEAM wallet if you use a local wallet, if you rely on exchanges make sure they have updated their wallets after the fork before doing any transactions. Some good exchanges to trade BEAM coins include Binance and Gateio.

The BEAM Hard Fork will also come with changes in the algorithm used for mining, the PoW algorithm will change from Beam Hash I (Equihash 150,5) to Beam Hash II (EquihashR variation). And while the new algorithm is still a modification of the Equihash you would still have to use a new miner or an updated one with support for the new algorithm (EquihashR parameters n = 150, k = 5 and r = 3). The initial information suggests that the new BeamHash II algorithms should be faster in terms of hashrate and with lower power consumption on the same hardware compared to the still currently used BeamHash I (Equihash 150,5) algorithm.

The software miner with support for BEAM mining have already started updating with support for the new algorithm, though not all of them already have Beam Hash II available. Our preferred Nvidia BEAM miner – GMiner 1.55 already has support for both AMD and Nvidia miners for the upcoming hardfork and the new BeamHash II algo… there is even an auto-switch function built-in, so that it will switch to the new algorithm after the fork is detected. The latest lolMiner 0.8.6 for AMD GPUs has added support for the BEAM hard fork and there is also an auto switch option available to help you seamlessly move to the new Beam Hash II algorithm. Other popular miners with BEAM support should most likely follow soon with updates adding the new algorithm as well…


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