It Is All About BTC, LTC, ETH, DOGE, KAS mining as well as other alternative crypto currencies
The craze surrounding PascalCoin (PASC) continues, but aside from solo mining with a very high difficulty that is viable only for very large miners, users with less GPUs and significantly smaller hashrate can now use the first available PASC mining pool from Nanopool. Do note that the Pascalcoin mining pool does currently have some limitation such as the availability only of a 64-bit Windows miner and you need to use the specially modified miner for the pool. Also the minimum payout is 1 PASC with with block reward confirmation after 110 blocks and the pool uses PPLNS payout scheme where N is defined as all submitted shares during the last 3 hours.
Among the good things is the fact that you don’t really need to have a PascalCoin account to mine on the pool (you need to find a block yourself to get an account), instead you can directly mine to an exchange’s account such as Poloniex. You only need to make sure that aside from the exchange address that you will be given you also set the correct unique payment-ID or payload in order to be able to get your payments. It is interesting to note that all of the top miners in terms of hashrate are mining directly to Poloniex addresses, obviously with the idea to trade the mined coins and not keep them long term. This may as well mean that the current high exchange rate may not be able to keep up the selling pressure and as soon as the first pool payments hit it may start dropping, so be wary of that as well.
Here is an example command line for running the miner on Pasc.Nanopool.org:
PascalCoinMiner.exe -s pasc-eu1.nanopool.org:15555 -p 0 -d 0,1,2,3,4,5 -n 86646-64.ab4df757230f6366.480s
In the above example you the very important part is the one after the -n parameter, where first you set the account address (86646-64 is for Poloniex), then the second part after the point is the unique ID being generated from the exchange and after that you can set the worker name such as 480s in the example. The other parameters such as server address, the platform ID and device IDs that will be used for mining are pretty much the same as for the miner available for solo mining aside from setting the pool address of course.
If you are looking for a mining calculator for PASC you can check out the one provided by CryptoCompare here. Be careful with the estimates the calculator is giving you as by the time you actually mine some coins and have them confirmed (it could take a couple of hours) the numbers might be very different. Also make sure that you measure the power usage of your mining rig(s) as the algorithm used by PascalCoin can be more power hungry than what you were lately used in terms of power consumption by other popular crypto coins such as Ethereum or Zcash for example.
– To check out the PascalCoin (PASC) mining pool now available from Nanopool…
After the initial craze due to the scarcity of Zcash (ZEC) coins and the big demand the prices has skyrocketed, but now with the slow start of mining progressing and the total block reward almost at 4 ZEC things are starting to stabilize. The initial crazy high profit for mining and selling Zcash coins seems to be over and at the moment mining and selling ETH or ZEC does bring almost the same profit for some GPU miners, though not for all. Miners with older AMD Radeon 79×0 and 280X GPUs still have higher profit mining Zcash than Ethereum, but for users with RX 480 for example things are already on the line to switch back to Ethereum. Nvidia seems to be currently lagging as far as performance optimizations for Zcash go, so the profitability there could be better for another algorithm or mining for another perspective in the long term crypto coin might also be a viable option.
You can keep track of the current profitability with the help of some useful mining calculators like the ones provided by CryptoCompare for both Zcash (ZEC) as well as for Ethereum (ETH) along with a few other popular coins such as Ethereum Classic (ETC), Monero (XMR), DigitalCash (DASH) and Litecoin (LTC). Make sure you set the correct hashrate your mining hardware is providing for each algorithm to make a proper calculation as different GPUs do provide different hashrate for the various algorithms. Do note that Etheeum Classic might also turn out to be pretty profitable alternative as well for some video cards that are still providing higher hashrate for the Ethash algorithm.
The official Ethereum graphical wallet is improving and getting more user friendly with each new beta release, making it easier for people that are not very happy with the console only clients such as geth and eth. The wallet relies on geth (by default) or eth as a backend and provides a user friendly interface with the most important information and functions available to the user without requiring him to type console commands to execute them. The latest Beta 6 release makes it easier to backup your wallet by adding a menu command that takes you directly tot he folder where your wallet is being stored, so the only thing you need to do is to copy the file in a safe location. The new wallet comes with a button called Deposit using Bitcoin that invokes integrated support for ShapeShift allowing you to easily and quickly buy Ether coins and have them easily transferred to your Ethereum wallet. Although the button is called Deposit with Bitcoin you can actually use other altcoins supported by ShapeShift to purchase Ethereum with the needed support built-in right into the wallet. Another useful new addition is that the wallet will now show historical prices from the time of the transaction thanks to integration with the CryptoCompare service, so you will know what was the exact fiat value of the Ethereum transaction at the moment you have made it.
– To download an try out the latest official Ethereum GUI Wallet 0.3.9 (Beta 6)…