Posts Tagged ‘Decred’

The Official Decred (DCR) Stake Pool is Now Live

7, Mar 2016

decred-stake-pool-mainnet

We have mentioned when the test stake pool for Decred (DCR) was released about two weeks ago and now the development team has announced that the staking pool is live on the mainnet. The stake pool allows you to purchase tickets and have the pool redeem and vote on your behalf without having to send actual coins to the pool or having your local wallet online and unlocked 24/7 for the Decred staking. Do note though that in both cases your staking coins used for ticket purchase remain locked. The development team also promises that the source code of the staking pool will be released to the public in a week from now, meaning that we are probably going to see some more alternative Decred staking pools becoming available soon after that.

Staking in Decred works in a similar way to a lottery, you purchase tickets with the available DCR coins you have or the amount you want to use. Ticket price started at 2 DCR and it changes based on users staking, though it is currently pretty high priced at about 14 DCR, so you might want to carefully choose the timing when to purchase tickets. Then you need wait for your ticket to be randomly chosen to validate a block or to be taken out of the lottery in 142 days if you do not win anything. The coins you use for staking (purchasing tickets for the lottery) will be locked until they are either chosen and you get your staking reward or 142 days pass . According to the information available the lottery lasts about 28 days average and the chance of a ticket not being selected in 142 days are less than 1%, but since it is all luck based your results may vary.

Do note that the staking pool is just making it easy for you to participate in the PoS phase of Decred mining, the staking rewards in the pool remain personal, so every participant is staking just like he would using a local wallet (you still need to have a local wallet to authorize the pool to vote and stake on your behalf). We are yet to see Decred staking pool becoming available where participants will play to win together and the rewards will be shared equally between all participants, so this will probably be the next step in DCR pool staking that we might be seeing further down the road.

– For more information and to try the official Decred Stake Pool now running on the main network…

DCRstats, a One Page Decred Network Status Overview

26, Feb 2016

dcrstats-website

The Decred (DCR) crypto currency is still fairly new and although it needs more work to become a more user friendly altcoin things are already happening with the latest useful addition being the website DCRstats. A single page website that presents a lot of useful information to help you keep track of what is happening with the Decred network at the moment – how is the price changing, what s the current difficulty and network hashrate, the average block time, the ticket price for PoS, how is the block reward distributed and how and when it will change and some more useful graphs and charts. You may even get some useful advice such as to not buy tickets for PoS at the moment, because the price is high and how much time you will need to wait for the next PoS difficulty adjustment to get a better price if you are staking Decred coins. So in short a website to keep a track of if you are mining, trading or just interested in how things are moving on with Decred (DCR) or to get a quick and good overview of the current situation. The best of all is that the project is open source, so you can check the code on GitHub and maybe even help in further improvement and development to make it even more useful and practical than it already is.

– To check out the DCRstats website for the current Decred network statistics…

Updated ccMiner 1.7.3 fork by tpruvot With Improved Decred Support

22, Feb 2016

ccminer-1-7-3-tpruvot-decred

A quick update with a new Windows binary compiled from the latest ccMiner 1.7.3-git fork from tpruvot (source) with some improvements regarding the Decred (DCR) that uses a bit different Blake256 14-round algorithm. This release supports Decred mining with both the traditional getwork implementation as well as the getwork over stratum support that yiimp and some other pools have already implemented. The release below includes two versions of ccMiner, one is 32-bit binary for Windows that is compiled with CUDA 6.5 and with support for Compute 2.0 or newer Nvidia GPUs, and another that is 64-bit Windows binary compiled with CUDA 7.5 for Compute 3.5 or newer Nvidia GPUs. Do note that if you have a newer Nvidia video card you should use the 64-bit CUDA 7.5 release as it is providing better hashrate than the 32-bit CUDA 6.5 binary. Below is a quick comparison of the performance of the two versions on a Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 WF3OC GPU running at stock frequencies.

Decred (DCR) performance on GTX 970:
– 32-bit CUDA 6.5: 1189 MHS
– 64-bit CUDA 7.5: 1298 MHS

– To download the latest ccMiner version 1.7.3 by tpruvot with Decred support for Windows OS…


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