Posts Tagged ‘Ether’

Augur’s Reputation Crowdsale Finishes With Over 5 Million USD

2, Oct 2015

augur-crowdsale-end

You can say that the Reputation crowdsale that is now over for what is being called the world’s first decentralized, prediction market – Augur, has been quite successful with over 5 million USD equivalent in Ethereum and Bitcoin collected from 4550 users. The “distributed oracle” application uses Ethereum’s network and is just one of the many Decentralized Applications (DAPPs) that are currently being developed. This is just demonstrating the interest and potential for development of decentralized applications powered by a blockchain and is supposed to realize the full potential of the Ethereum by design. At the same time lately we have been seeing a drop in the price of the Ether coins that are the currency of Ethereum currently being mined by users for a little over 2 months now. Since Ethereum is actually relatively new crypto currency, especially if you consider when was the official launch of the network, even though it has been under development for quite some time we should just now start seeing its potential actually being shown with decentralized applications such as Augur. Do note that Augur has not been officially launched, just their crowdsale of Reputation has finished even though they have a working Alpha version available to get an idea what the platform will offer.

Ethereum is Getting More User Friendly with AlethOne

15, Sep 2015

alethone-gui-rc2

The C++ implementation of the Ethereum client (cpp-ethereum) is getting more user friendly with the new AlethOne GUI intended to simplify the mining process for users that are not into programming and hate to use console-based software. The AlethOne GUI is going to be a part of the eth client, though currently it is only available in a release candidate form and it will be interfacing with the eth client. The first time you run the GUI it will ask you for a password and will generate an Ethereum wallet address, then start synchronizing the blockchain. The good thing is that AlethOne presents the user with a simple interface and reports in an easy to read details about the functionality of the eth client in the backend such as the Ether balance you have or the blockchain synchronization status or even the hashrate when mining. As for the mining you get an easy option for solo mining or pool mining with a field to enter the pool URL to mine at and after you have mined some coins you have the option to easily initiate a transfer to another account.

So far the latest release candidate of AlethOne looks quite nice and works decently, though there are apparently some more things that need work before the final release is available. For example it seems that the mining is only working on the first GPU and if you have multiple video cards that you want to mine with there is no way to tell the miner to use them all form the GUI apparently. The Withdraw functionality also needs some more work in te form of any feedback returned in the AlethOne GUI regarding the execution of the transaction such as if it was successful or not etc. Regardless things are already looking good and the AlethOne GUI with some more improvement and fixes is definitely something that Ethereum needs in order to become easier to be used by not so advanced users – basic wallet and mining functionality in a streamlined desktop client.

– You can download and try the latest cpp-ethereum with AlethOne release candidate 2…

Updated Ethminer 0.9.41 Nvidia CUDA Version for Windows

9, Sep 2015

new-ethminer-cuda-updated

The developer of the Ethminer fork with Nvidia CUDA support (source) Genoil has released another update and we have compiled a new Windows binary of ethminer with CUDA support. Do note that this Windows binary release is compiled with VS2013 for windows 64-bit and is for CUDA 6.5. The latest version comes with some optimizations and a new command line option cuda-schedule to experiment with that replaces the old cuda-turbo, also note that you may need to manually specify the number of GPUs to use if you have multiple video cards using the cuda-devices command line parameter if the miner fires only on one device by default. Additionally to get better performance you can try adding the following command line parameters to the ethminer:

For OpenCL: --cl-global-work 16384
For CUDA: --cuda-grid-size 8192 --cuda-block-size 128 --cuda-schedule auto

--cuda-schedule Set the schedule mode for CUDA threads waiting for CUDA devices to finish work. Default is sync. Possible values for mode are:
auto – Uses a heuristic based on the number of active CUDA contexts in the process C and the number of logical processors in the system P. If C > P, then yield else spin.
spin – Instruct CUDA to actively spin when waiting for results from the device.
yield – Instruct CUDA to yield its thread when waiting for results from the device.
sync – Instruct CUDA to block the CPU thread on a synchronization primitive when waiting for the results from the device.

It seems that the auto mode for cuda-schedule works best for us providing maybe a bit lower maximum hashrate, but a more stable one than the sync that may produce higher maxes, but also lower. You are free to experiment what will work best on your mining configuration however. The Ethminer CUDA fork should work on Compute 2.0 or newer GPUs, but the performance on older GPUs can be worse, also don’t forget that you can run Ethminer in OpenCL mode as well on Nvidia-based video cards and not only on AMD if you are having trouble with the CUDA support or the hashrate you get is lower as compared to OpenCL.

– Download the updated Ethminer CUDA fork compiled for Windows and ready to be used…


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