Posts Tagged ‘Bitcoin interest

The ProgPoW mining algorithm is still not widely used by crypto projects, some of you migh remember Bitcoin Interest (BCI) as the first to switch their PoW mining to ProgPoW, but now the project is pretty much dying a slow death. And while we are waiting to see when and if Ethereum (ETH) will finally switch from Ethash to ProgPoW as a mining algorithm, there is another project that has been using ProgPoW for a while now – Super Zero (SERO) that you may play around with if you want to see the current status of ProgPoW miners. There are of course some other projects using ProgPoW as well, but among them SERO is pretty much the most popular one. We remind you that ProgPoW or Programmatic Proof-of-Work was designed in a way that it utilizes graphics processors to their maximum in order to provide an equal level performance without favoring a specific GPU manufacturer or being able to actually provide much faster hashrate if implemented on ASICs. Some good places to trade the coin include Citex, Gateio and Hotbit.

Recently GMiner has added support for ProgPoW mining for SERO on Nvidia GPUs, however that was a bit problematic as it required the user to install the respective Nvidia CUDA Toolkit for the video drivers you have used. The latest GMiner 2.01 has addressed this problem by including the required runtime libraries needed for ProgPoW support, so things are easier and less problematic using GMiner 2.01 for mining SERO on Nvidia GPUs using the ProgPoW algo. GMiner however is not the only mining software to support ProgPoW, it is just the latest one to add support, prior to that you could mine using MBMiner and also prior to that with TT-Miner. In fact TT-Miner (Trade-Tec Miner) was one of the first to introduce ProgPoW support along with the controversial and now not available anymore Progminer software.

Now, the big question that remains is which mine of the three should you be using if you are mining SERO with the ProgPoW algorithm on Nvidia GPUs? Well, performance wise all of the miners are doing pretty much the same in our up to date tests done on GTX 1080 Ti… it seems that ProgPoW support is based on the same kernel in all of the miners and not much has been further optimized (maybe not much is possible) since last year. So how can you make the right choice if hashrate is the almost the same on all of the 3 available miners, you should simply look at other things, like the dev fee that these miners have. GMiner and NBMiner do come with 2% developer fee for ProgPoW mining while TT-Miner has only 1% dev fee for all of the supported algorithm, so it seems like the best choice for the moment.

To download and try the latest TT-Miner 3.2.2 for SERO (Super Zero) ProgPoW mining…

ProgPoW or Programmatic Proof-of-Work can be seen as the successor of the Ethash algorithm with enhanced ASIC resistance and while it has been available for a while there hasn’t been that much going around the new algorithm up until recently. The fact that Ethereum (ETH) is considering the switch from Ethash to ProgPoW in the near future has sparkled interest in the algorithm and we may soon start seeing more coins and miners talking about the use of that particular algo. Some of you might remember that Bitcoin Interest (BCI) was the first crypto coin to switch to the ProgPoW a couple of months ago. And while BCI hasn’t been doing that well actually, before or even after the fork to ProgPoW, it is still interesting to note that it was the first to use it and it also provided pre-compiled binaries of the initial miner for ProgPow.

Meanwhile there hasn’t been that much alternative miners up until recently that had support for ProgPow, probably due to the fact that further significant optimizations in terms of performance might not be possible for the available mining hardware. One of the more recent and not very popular yet miners available with ProgPoW support is TT-Miner, a closed source miner with 1% developer fee available only for Windows and working only on more recent Nvidia GPUs. TT-Miner (TradeTec Miner) also supports Ethash, UBQhash and MTP aside from ProgPoW and in our limited experience it has performed pretty good on a variety of Nvidia GPUs.

Another really fresh ProgPow miner that was just made available and that apparently needs more work is Progminer. It is forked from Ethminer and the source is available along with compiled binaries for Windows and Linux, do note that there are separate pre-compiled binaries available for AMD and for Nvidia GPUs, so make sure you download the correct one. This is probably the best miner to go for at the moment for ProgPoW specs wise, unless you have some trouble making it work on your particular hardware as we have encountered some issues already… Feel free to report your issues (if you have) and what performance running any of these ProgPoW miners in the comments below.

A few days ago the Bitcoin Interest (BCI) fork of Bitcoin has successfully switched to the ProgPoW algorithm, becoming the first crypto coin to actually utilize this new algorithm. ProgPoW is a proof-of-work algorithm designed to close the efficiency gap available to specialized ASICs. It utilizes almost all parts of commodity hardware (GPUs), and comes pre-tuned for the most common GPU hardware utilized in the Ethereum network. The design goal of ProgPoW is to have the algorithm’s requirements match what is available on commodity GPUs, so if the algorithm were to be implemented on a custom ASIC hardware there should be little opportunity for efficiency gains compared to a commodity GPU. This all means that in theory the ProgPoW algorithm will not see ASIC mining hardware, due to no opportunity to get much faster speeds compared to what a GPU is capable of delivering. This essentially means that ProgPoW should in theory be a really ASIC-resistant proof of work algorithm…

If you are interested in more details you can check the official BCI website, and miners would most likely be interested in the mining software, pools and a Bitcoin Interest mining calculator in order to see what is the current mining profitability of your GPU rigs. Here you can also find a BCI Block Explorer to see how are things progressing with the Bitcoin Interest blockchain. You might also be interested in the Bitcoin Interest GitHub repository for the official wallets, miners and so on.

BCI ProgPoW Miners:
Nvdia ProgPoW miner for Windows
AMD ProgPoW miner for Windows
ProgPoW miners for Linux

BCI Mining Pools:
LuckyPool
AltPool
Suprnova
CoinBlockers
ProgPool
NibiruPool
BasementPool

BCI Exchanges:
HitBTC
Stex


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